"The Moment," which is the Internet arm of T magazine, which is the lucrative and shiny yet still-born conjoined fetal twin of the New York Times, has gone way too far out onto the Internet. This morning's in-house e-mail from Times digital honcho Jon Landman notes that "The Moment" now has its own Twitter account. Setting aside issues with "The Moment" itself, which has its ups and downs—great work by veteran art writer Linda Yablonsky, stupendously less great work by some other people—the Twitter experiment is a real problem.
1. Their Twitter only "follows" (that's geek parlance for which other Twitter feeds "The Moment" tracks) other New York Times Twitter accounts. It's anti-Internet—it's output only. It's taking something fun and communal and using it to hip up a corporate product.
2. Their Twitter is post-literate. A "dance floor" was "starting to pump"!
3. Their Twitter is self-promotioney, including as nearly every "tweet" does a link to one of their blog posts. Twitter is not an RSS feed for your website. Your website has an RSS feed.
4. Their Twitter is author-unidentified. Who exactly is at the urinal next to Sean Lennon? Is it this person who identifies himself as JP? Huh what? What stunted hybrid of journalism and marketing and party-going is this exactly?
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