In mid-2021, Gabor Cselle purchased a $15 Moleskine pocket book to sketch out concepts for brand spanking new startups. On the primary web page, he wrote “T2” and commenced taking notes for a greater model of Twitter. Cselle had bought startups to Google and Twitter and labored at each firms. (He was on the time at Google for a second stint, as a director at Space 120, its startup incubator.) However he couldn’t work out how to attract individuals away from “T1”—the unique Twitter—and set the concept apart.
Then got here Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, which noticed its new proprietor lay off over half of Twitter’s workers, troll the group with alienating tweets, and speculate about including options like long-form video. “It was principally the worst-case state of affairs of how Twitter should not be run,” says Cselle, who lastly did depart Google final summer time. (He received out simply in time: Last month’s layoffs basically defunded Area 120.) The time had arrived, he felt, to pursue the dream of T2. He lastly had his differentiator: His model of Twitter can be extra like … Twitter, within the basic sense. T2 can be much less a revamp than a restoration, an try to recapture the joy of early Twitter and construct from there.
T2, which received’t be the ultimate title for the product, is now live in a really restricted take a look at model. 9 individuals work for the corporate, together with Cselle’s cofounder, Sarah Oh, who had been an government in consumer security for Fb and, most not too long ago, Twitter. Final month T2 obtained $1.35 million in angel funding from a number of well-connected Silicon Valley buyers.
However T2 is way from alone. Cselle is speaking with me at a bustling WeWork with spectacular views situated in Salesforce Tower in San Francisco. It may very well be that possibly half of the intense younger techies typing at work tables and sofas are constructing new social media apps to problem Twitter or different social apps which have misplaced their attraction in pursuit of mass audiences and advert income. T2 faces startup competitors from Mastodon, Countersocial, Put up, Hive Social, and extra. All of them have completely different twists on a short-form social community. None of them are fairly as brazen as Cselle in claiming to duplicate what was as soon as the fun of the unique.
“Individuals cannot resist futzing with the format, but it surely works,” Cselle says. “Individuals have a background course of of their brains: What’s a crispy 280-character factor I can say about this factor that simply occurred? Why mess with that? And what if you may get that very same crispy 280-character factor in entrance of people who find themselves actually related to you? I feel that’d be fairly cool.”
It might even be bucking what on reflection looks as if a gravitational draw back from social networks being social. The pursuit of the viral has diminished the intimacy of the non-public, and because the enterprise fashions of the early networks centered closely on delivering audiences for advertisers, they more and more grew to become a brand new model of broadcasting. Social networks as soon as passionate about Dunbar’s Number, the declare that people can solely meaningfully work together with 150 individuals they know nicely. What you noticed was decided by who you knew, or who you needed to know extra about. Now Meta, Twitter and the remaining algorithmically join you to “content material it’s possible you’ll be fascinated about,” which extra probably than not entails influencers who spend all their time concocting methods to seize your consideration with calorically empty content material. Or stuff that enrages you. Cselle desires to roll again the clock as if all that by no means occurred. “It’s form of retro,” he says. “Bear in mind what Twitter felt like in 2007 when it was actual individuals sharing issues from their life and never airbrushed Tiktoks?”
