I'm just sitting at the keyboard, writing.

Until 2009 Twitter simply asked us "What are you doing?":

It seemed to me at the time that the only truly accurate answer to that question would have been "writing an update to Twitter", but most people were willing to take the question a bit less literally and simply reported on what they had been doing that caused them to report on Twitter. In a blog post from November of 2009 Biz Stone explained that people (and companies) were generating new and different uses for Twitter, and that called for a change in the opening question:

People, organizations, and businesses quickly began leveraging the open nature of the network to share anything they wanted, completely ignoring the original question, seemingly on a quest to both ask and answer a different, more immediate question, “What’s happening?”

Which sort of explains why we're now asked:

Stone added:

The fundamentally open model of Twitter created a new kind of information network and it has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates.

And just maybe it wasn't only an issue of outgrowing the "concept of personal status updates", but also a change in the users' desire to post those updates.

Go to: Online knows best?