Are we about to witness the rapid demise of Twitter, either in its current form or forever? The way Elon Musk has approached its workforce since his takeover, it seems like a very real possibility – and if it does survive, it may well end up being unrecognisable as a mass participation social platform.
Fortunately, although Bookswarm does have an account on there, and nearly 600 followers, we’ve never been very good at using it and it won’t be a big problem for us if Twitter goes away. If Twitter does survive but allows previously-banned users to come back (naming no names), we may shut down our account anyway.
The majority of the websites we’ve built since Twitter launched will have at least a link to the Twitter account of the site owner; many will also have embedded Twitter feeds. Some have social sharing plugins that encourage the user to Tweet a link to the site. A few have more extensive integration – for example, literary agency sites or publisher sites that include author Twitter handles, or even include authors’ recent Tweets directly on the page. If Twitter crashes and burns, all this will need to be changed.
Any clients who want to get ahead of the rush to remove Twitter integrations from their websites should get in touch with us. In most cases it will be simple enough to deactivate or hide Twitter-related functionality, but some thought may need to be given to what (if anything) replaces it.
In the meantime, pass the popcorn…