In mid-2021, Gabor Cselle bought a $15 Moleskine notebook to sketch out ideas for startups. On the first page, he writes “T2” and starts taking notes for a better version of Twitter. Cselle sold startups to Google and Twitter and worked at both. (At the time, he was at Google for a second stint, as a director of Area 120, its startup incubator.) But he couldn’t figure out how to lure people away from ” T1”—the original Twitter—and setting the idea aside.
Then it was Elon Musk’s turn to take over Twitter, whose new owners fired more than half of Twitter’s employees, mocked the community with alienating tweets and speculated about adding features like long video. “It’s basically a worst-case scenario for how Twitter shouldn’t be run,” said Cselle, who finally left Google last summer. (He got out at the right time: fired last month nature Area 120 funding cut.) The time has come, he feels, to pursue T2’s dream. He finally has a difference: His version of Twitter will be more like… Twitter, in the classic sense. T2 will not be an overhaul but a rollback, an attempt to recapture the excitement of early Twitter and build on it.
T2will not be the final name of the product, currently live in a very limited trial version. Nine people work for the company, including the co-founder of Cselle, Sarah Oh, who was the executive director of user safety for Facebook and most recently Twitter. Last month, T2 received $1.35 million in angel funding from several well-connected investors in Silicon Valley.
But T2 is not alone. Cselle is talking to me at a bustling WeWork with breathtaking views located in the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco. It is possible that half of the smart young technicians who are knocking on desks and sofas are building new social media apps to challenge Twitter or other social apps that have lost their appeal in pursue mass audiences and advertising revenue. T2 faces startup competition from Mastodon, Countersocial, Post, Hive Social, etc. All have different tendencies on a short form social network. None of them are as brazen as Cselle in claiming to copy what was once the thrill of the original.
“People can’t resist getting associated with this format, but it works,” says Cselle. “People have a background process in their brains: Can I say a crunchy 280 character thing about this thing that just happened? Why mess with that? And what if you could get that same compelling 280-character piece of content in front of people who are actually relevant to you? I think that would be pretty cool.”
It will also make it difficult to look back on what may seem like an attractive force for social networks. The pursuit of virality has diminished personal intimacy, and as the business models of early networks focused heavily on providing audiences for advertisers, they have increasingly become a session. new broadcast. Social network once haunted Dunbar’s number, which claims that humans can only meaningfully interact with 150 people they know well. What you see is determined by who you know or who you want to know more about. Now, Meta, Twitter, and the rest connect you with “content you might be interested in” algorithmically, which is more likely to involve influencers spending all of their time Create ways to grab your attention with content that has no energy. Or things that make you angry. Cselle wants to go back in time as if all of that never happened. “It’s kind of a classic,” he said. “Remember how Twitter felt back in 2007 when it was real people sharing things from their lives, not edited Tiktok?”
