Last night Seal (@Seal) tweeted about his displeasure with the latest Twitter iPhone app. Doug Bowman (@stop), Creative Director at Twitter, asked him to elaborate:
@Seal I’m listening if you have feedback (about Twitter’s design).
— Doug Bowman (@stop) December 29, 2011
What followed is one of those exchanges that make me absolutely love the Internet. A world-famous musician has a conversation about an iPhone app with a world-famous designer, and we get to sit in on it. I think my favorite part of the conversation is Seal’s honest apology:
@stop Thank you. Redownloaded Official Twitter app and a public apology is in order. It’s great now that I understand it. I was wrong.
— Seal (@Seal) December 30, 2011
I can’t quite put my finger on why I find this random chat so great. Maybe it’s because it shows the power of Twitter to reduce degrees of separation to zero in a matter of minutes. Maybe it’s the fact that I can sit in Cape Town, South Africa, and listen to two people who I admire a great deal have a respectful disagreement in real time. Or maybe it’s because I keep thinking about the bizarre exhilaration Doug must have felt, defending an app he worked on with a musician he’s a fan of.
Whatever the reason might be, it’s just really cool. Unfortunately Twitter still isn’t great at showing us conversations (apparently that’s being worked on), but luckily Aaron Swartz built a tool to help us with that. I’m posting a screenshot of the conversation below, but you can also view it here.