by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
If I had my way, I would scrap the current concept of what Time Magazine is altogether and re-invent it as a social media platform that would take advantage of the problems that both Twitter and Facebook are having right now. As you may know, Time is going to be sold — probably by June — and it really will be the end of an era. Time Magazine is kind of the New York Times of magazines, in a sense, and so when it changes hands it will mean A Lot to people like me.
Of course, some insane Right wing nutjob is going to buy Time and we’re all fucked. They’re going to buy it because they can get it on the cheap and Time’s brand name to old farts like me and Donald Trump is pretty potent. But it would be cool if someone would take my advice and scrap Time as we currently conceive of it and turn it into a social media platform. I would seed this new Time startup with content from the magazine, but I would go even further and deconstruct the magazine down to its core parts.
In other words, I would have Time Magazine writers and editors become users of a new Twitter or Facebook competitor that could really do something interesting. Why have those people writing articles in a traditional sense when you could have them posting stories directly into a new platform. That would be pretty cool.
I have on my Instagram account gone into great lengths about what this new service would be like, but in short it would be based on the concepts of Usenet, which was popular about 20 years ago. Now, I know Reddit does something similar to Usenet, but feel its application is kind of ham-handed.
It’s definitely an intriguing idea, though. The below video talks about this idea some, too.
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