In mid-2021, Gabor Cselle purchased a $15 Moleskine pocket book to sketch out concepts for brand new startups. On the primary web page, he wrote “T2” and commenced taking notes for a greater model of Twitter. Cselle had offered 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 Area 120, its startup incubator.) But he couldn’t determine how to attract folks away from “T1”—the unique Twitter—and set the thought apart.

Then got here Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, which noticed its new proprietor lay off over half of Twitter’s employees, troll the group with alienating tweets, and speculate about including options like long-form video. “It was basically the worst-case scenario of how Twitter shouldn’t be run,” says Cselle, who lastly did depart Google final summer season. (He acquired out simply in time: Last month’s layoffs primarily defunded Area 120.) The time had arrived, he felt, to pursue the dream of T2. He lastly had his differentiator: His model of Twitter could be extra like … Twitter, within the basic sense. T2 could 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 identify for the product, is now live in a really restricted take a look at model. Nine folks work for the corporate, together with Cselle’s cofounder, Sarah Oh, who had been an government in consumer security for Facebook and, most lately, Twitter. Last month T2 acquired $1.35 million in angel funding from a number of well-connected Silicon Valley buyers.  

But T2 is way from alone. Cselle is speaking with me at a bustling WeWork with spectacular views positioned in Salesforce Tower in San Francisco. It may very well be that perhaps half of the brilliant 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, Post, Hive Social, and extra. All of them have totally 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 joys of the unique.

“People can’t resist futzing with the format, but it works,” Cselle says. “People have a background process in their brains: What is a crispy 280-character thing I can say about this thing that just happened? Why mess with that? And what if you can get that same crispy 280-character thing in front of people who are really relevant to you? I think that’d be pretty cool.”

It would 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 private, 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 folks they know properly. What you noticed was decided by who you knew, or who you wished to know extra about. Now Meta, Twitter and the remainder algorithmically join you to “content you may be interested in,” which extra possible than not includes influencers who spend all their time concocting methods to seize your consideration with calorically empty content material. Or stuff that enrages you. Cselle needs to roll again the clock as if all that by no means occurred. “It’s kind of retro,” he says. “Remember what Twitter felt like in 2007 when it was real people sharing things from their life and not airbrushed Tiktoks?”