[This is the English version of post originally published on c/blog]
Are museums people?
What is a museum online? A website is a destination so visiting a museum’s website is analogous to visiting its building—it has an address on the internet just as it has an address on the street (assuming it isn’t a virtual museum!) The same term, “visitor,” is used to identify you both when you view the museum’s homepage and when you walk through its doors. In email, sending an inquiry to the main museum email address isn’t much different from calling the museum’s main telephone number. Email and websites were born in institutions—the first people to have either in large numbers were at universities—so models were easily found for the existing needs and practices of museums.
Should we abandon Twitter? Can we? I doubt it, but recent events have shown just how user-unfriendly Twitter can be, not just in the workings of their service but in their beliefs of what their service should be. In an announcement on March 11 they made many third-party developers out to be term-violators and freeloaders, virtual squatters in the mansion of the tweet. But Twitter users built that mansion, and now Twitter seems out to serve users only as well as users serve Twitter.
