Hey, Hey, Hey, Twitter! Here’s the Real “What’s Happening!”
by Kara Swisher
Posted on November 20, 2009 at 2:16 AM PT
BoomTown was intrigued when Mind-Your-Own Biz Stone, one of the co-founders of Twitter, penned a blog post yesterday about the microblogging service changing its prompting question.
Now, above the little Twitter box, it reads, “What’s Happening?” and not the original tweet query, “What are you doing?”
“The fundamentally open model of Twitter created a new kind of information network and it has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates,” wrote Stone. “Twitter helps you share and discover what’s happening now among all the things, people, and events you care about. ‘What are you doing?’ isn’t the right question anymore…”
While the blogosphere covered this development as if it were a moment of monumental meaning, most were ignorant that the true beacon of innovative What’s-Happeningness does not reside in Silicon Valley.
Instead, it would be embodied completely by the 1970s television show, “What’s Happening!”
The sitcom was about three African-American teens living in the Watts section of Los Angeles–Raj, Rerun and Dwayne.
Here’s a video of the opening of the show, episodes of which can be found in their entirety all over the Web, and from which much Hey-Hey-Hey wisdom can be gleaned:
