Does Time (or Steven B) "Get" Twitter?

Steven Berlin Johnson (@StevenBJohnson) tweeted that he wrote the cover article for Time How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live and the tweet Iphone photo goes on the Time’s cover. He blogged: Me on Twitter on Time on Twitter.

Probably this is a step further in getting Twitter more mainstream attention.

The Time June 15 issue will reach the news stand on June 11, 2009. For a couple of days the coverage it gets on Twitter is Ah Maa Zing. In that respect Time did “Get It”. Here is Steven’s first Tweet: Roughly counting the twitter search “How Twitter Will Change the Way we Live” brings a good 1500 tweets and counting in just 2 days. It even hit the top 5 for a short time. One should notice that currently 1500 is the cap of the Twitter Search API. As comparison: I’m just writing this during the third set of the Roland Garos French Open finale of Swiss Roger Federer against Swedish Soderling. After Federer wipes Soderling in three strait sets from the center court the French Open search hits the 1500 cap in just over 20 minutes…

But does Time “Get It”, or does it merely piggy back on Twitter to get some attention in these dire economic circumstances for the printed media?

The reason I’m asking this question is that I have read and reread the article and was not overly impressed.

In short Steven:

1. Explains a bit about Twitter and their founders
2. Attended a congress where there was a life tweet screen (been there, seen that)
3. Mentions the recently added search function and how this could be an antidote to Google
4. bla bla about third party tools
5. more bla bla
6. and concludes with this quote: “There’s a kind of resilience here that is worth savoring. The weather reports keep announcing that the sky is falling, but here we are ” millions of us ” sitting around trying to invent new ways to talk to one another.”

Inspiring? Actually not so much. Why didn’t he get a bit more personal? How does he keep up with his followers? How did Twitter change his life? apparently not at all.

I checked out Steven a bit: His first tweet was this one: Hello Twitter. I come in Peace for all Mankind and has since (Oct 2007) produced a mere 470 something tweets….a mere average of under 1 tweet a day. with 670K followers he seems to be a sort of celebrity by himself. However: He doesn’t seem much of a connector. So I’m asking: Maybe they chose the wrong person to do the cover story?

I checked a WSJ article from him. That gives a way better insight about Steven. He loves books more than everything else.

Maybe this is only about my own amazement about how much coverage all this gets… What would you say?

Update: Uhm Noticed a counter error that says there are 16 comments but I do see only one