Should Twitter drop the 'what are you doing' prompt?

Looking at my Twitter feed, there's a lot more in there than just status updates of people saying what they're doing. I'd say that at least two thirds of the posts are either conversation or micro blog posts (opinions; links; updates from Seesmic and other sources.)

So in the majority of cases, the 'what are you doing?' prompt isn't relevant, and a status isn't really a status - it's just a post. It feels like Twitter has evolved based on how users really want to use it, and new ideas made possible by the versatile API. This evolution is very healthy for Twitter and I think it could be time for it to change its paradigm from status updates to simply being a social micro-blogging platform.

Comments

[Trevor]

I'm not so sure. While extreme users, such as ourselves, now use Twitter as a virtual brain fart and public IM its user base is still pretty small.

"What are you doing?" gives new users an initial prompt to post something -- anything! -- to grasp the idea and to get the ball rolling.

[Tom Nixon]

I wouldn't object to some helpful prompts to give users ideas for their first post, but overall it's confusing to attempt to shepherd people into a specific use of the system when actually most posts are something different. It just looks odd when someone's 'status' says '@someone - yeah I agree'. If new users realise that Twitter is much more than just 'what are you doing?' then hopefully they'll get drawn in and make more use of it.

[Tom Nixon]

Facebook had the right idea when they stopped people having to start their status with 'is'.

[Trevor]

Facebook still uses the "is" as a default prompt, but can now be overwritten. This is great because, again, it still allows people to quickly grasp the idea, but no longer limits them.

[Beth Granter]

I think they should drop it for sure. It has always annoyed me because even if you do answer the question properly, the output doesn't make sense. E.g. if you answer, "I am going to town", Twitter outputs this as "Bethgranter I am going to town". So you end up answering "What are you doing?" with "is going to town", which doesn't make sense until it has been output. If that makes sense...