Happy 5th Birthday Twitter
March 23rd, 2011 | by Jen |Whether you think Twitter is the greatest thing to happen to communications since Gutenberg or the worst, there’s plenty of evidence to support your views. For the prosecution we have Charlie Sheen, who attracted 1 million followers in 25 hours and 17 minutes earlier this month as his manic ranting spiralled out of control; at last count, his not-so-bons mots had more than 3 million followers.
Running the case for the defence are the people of Tunisia, who used Twitter to help organise the January protests that prompted President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali to vacate the seat of power he’d ruthlessly occupied for 23 years.
So, is Twitter a force for banality, exhibitionism and the pursuit (or maintenance) of celebrity? Or is it the most powerful tool for political mobilisation ever invented? Or could it be that Twitter is both these things, and maybe a lot more (and a lot less) besides?
In truth, we’re still getting to know Twitter. The microblogging service developed by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams turns five this week. The three were colleagues at Silicon Valley start-up Odeo, which was trying, not very successfully, to develop a video-messaging service; frustrated by a lack of progress, everyone at the firm took a break to work on small-scale side projects to clear their minds.
Dorsey, Stone and Williams wanted to explore the potential of instant text messaging, which was then new to the US. They started work on their project on March 13, 2006. On March 21, the first automated message - ”just setting up my twttr” - was sent. Soon after that, Dorsey sent the first manually generated message, ”inviting coworkers”. Twitter was off and running.
Those and other messages from the earliest days of Twitter are being retweeted this month as Twitter Inc marks this five-year milestone that is as much about a transition in perception - from frivolous time-waster to unignorable mass medium - as it is about marking the years. But it turns out the anniversary is slightly misleading: as Dorsey recently told The Telegraph in Britain, the first ”tweet” (though it wasn’t called that at the time) was in fact sent five years earlier.
Dorsey told journalist Emma Barnett that in 2001: ”I wrote some code for my BlackBerry and created an email list of friends. And when I was in the Golden Gate Bison Park [in San Francisco] I sent a message saying: ‘I am at the bison park.’ That was essentially the first tweet but no one saw it in real time, and then when they did they all replied asking me why I was bothering to tell them what I was doing while I was doing it?”
It’s a valid criticism, but to say that Twitter is useful only for such solipsistic jottings is like saying pen and paper are useful only for playing Hangman. Twitter is a medium with both constraints and opportunities, and how it is deployed will ultimately be limited mostly by our imaginations.