The origin of “tweet” at Twitter (2013)

https://furbo.org/2013/06/28/the-origin-of-tweet/

by goranmoomin • 5 years ago

120 47 5 years ago

minikites• 5 years ago

Twitter gained almost all of their value from third party clients and once they had that value, they told those developers to go jump in a lake. Don't help companies for free, they will never repay you.

cbozeman• 5 years ago

I don't know enough to know if that's true, but I do believe you, and:

Don't help companies for free, they will never repay you.

Is apparently not true, because Rockstar paid that guy for speeding up GTA Online's loading time... but a sample size of 1 is pretty bad data, I'll freely admit.

nielsbot• 5 years ago

"probably almost never" :)

bigth• 5 years ago

I say it is true. There used to be a lot of very popular twitter desktop apps that were used by the early adopters who brought lot of traffic to the platform.

filmgirlcw2• 5 years ago

It is completely true. The term tweet, the @ sign, the hashtag, the bird imagery, the concept of the retweet and the quote tweet. Hell, the original Twitter for iOS client was Tweetie (which Twitter acquired), which introduced features like pull-to-refresh (a parent that now belongs to Twitter but is licensed freely to others).

And Twitter did obliterate its relationships with its dev community. Totally killed it. The motives were sort of understandable in the abstract, Twitter wanted to control its experience and the sheer number of third party clients really went against that. Hell, the whole reason they bought Tweetdeck was defensive, because another company wanted to buy it and Tweetdeck had such huge usage in the brand management/large account Twitter space.

The problem was by going scorched earth, Twitter gave the middle finger to not just developers like Iconfactory and others that created core features, but it really had the add-on effect of abruptly killing all the innovation that happened on top of their platform.

The good news is that over the years, Twitter as a company has changed. The new API isn’t going to be a return to the pre-2013 days, but it does give developers a lot more options and freedom than before. Twitter smartly is still charging for API calls past a certain number and for broader access to the firehose — and it should, to be honest — and that means the days of being able to make good money off of a Twitter client are over for good (even Iconfactory and Tweetbot had to go subscription, which I think is fair for what are now very niche apps), but the new API is huge improvement and I do think the current team is really working to build good relationships with devs going forward, even if they can’t rectify the past.

donohoe• 5 years ago

Sure, but in this case it was a Twitter developer, Blaine Cook, that suggested the word "tweet"

dmos62• 5 years ago

I'm a fan of taking a dip in a lake, though if they paid me for it, that would be even better.

twobitshifter• 5 years ago

I wonder if Twitter compensated the icon factory for coming up with the bird mascot?

Graffur• 5 years ago

What I like about this story is that it shows you don't have to be perfect at launch. In fact, launching instead of over perfecting everything is probably better.

jonny_eh2• 5 years ago

His tweet at the end that is supposed to be the first to be tagged with a source other than web... says web?

jonny_eh2• 5 years ago

It's amazing how much of Twitter wasn't created by the company, but by its users. "Tweets", "hashtags", "@replies", all created by users. "Tweet" has since been trademarked by the company. [0]

[0] https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/update-twitter-finally-lan...

nextstep• 5 years ago

It’s too bad the system isn’t collectively owned by the users.

Workaccount2• 5 years ago

I wanna know who supplanted PM with DM.

It's PM god damnit!

hbosch• 5 years ago

PMs imply privacy.

camehere3saydis• 5 years ago

Most likely a project manager.

mattowen_uk• 5 years ago

"Slid into their DMs"... Arrrgh!

On and Off I try with Twitter, but it just doesn't work for me. I would delete my account, but there's so many companies and services who are only accessible via their Twitter accounts, that without an ability to message them, you can't raise an issue.

As an interesting (well, to me) side note, a few months ago I migrated away from being 'Jaruzel' on many sites to 'MattOwen_UK'. Within 24 hours of switching my account name on Twitter, someone else had grabbed @jaruzel. I was surprised at the speed that happened.

controlledchaos• 5 years ago

Dungeon Master sounds pretty cool in my books!

LasangaCode• 5 years ago

The same goes for all social medias. They're all-user generated content.

dang• 5 years ago

I don't think the GP was talking about content so much as how Twitter's features were shaped in the early years, by formalizing how users were creatively adapting the site. Twitter stood out that way.

codemac• 5 years ago

Not true at all - stories ala Snapchat were not invented by users.

Twitter was (but no longer) awesome by allowing folks to consume plain text with socially agreed upon meaning rather than features of the client. It's my feeling that instead of piling on more metadata into the posts, they could have done something more similar to RES on reddit, and expanded the text limit.

webwielder2• 5 years ago

Threads, too. And Favorites was a feature for bookmarking but users turned it into a Like button. Also I believe their bird logo was bought at iStock.

soneca• 5 years ago

Even the blue bird apparently

stormbrew• 5 years ago

Also retweets. And quote tweets.

And they made nearly every one of those things worse somehow. It's almost impressive.

slver3• 5 years ago

Looking back at old Twitter rather reminds me how simplicity was its main selling point. No threads, no images, no long tweets, and so on.

They've since doubled their length and add bunch of meta information on every post, rendering it basically indistinguishable from any other social network.

Twitter today is running on network effects and brand recognition, not core value. That core value is gone.

bena• 5 years ago

I mean originally, it was supposed to be mass SMS. I send a message and anyone who wanted to receive it did so. It was sort of like proto-group SMS messaging.

slver3• 5 years ago

Let's make a 32 char Twitter...

thinkingemote• 5 years ago

Originally it was also a place to set your Instant messenger status message. Tweets were also called "statuses" for quite a while.

Some of the tweets in the article follow that

Thinkingemote "is thinking about triple tags today"

inteoryx• 5 years ago

Do you think Twitter was better when it was simpler? I expect Twitter likely has some data to support their move towards more complicated and longer tweets plus more features.

This reminds me of how I think back on the "good old days" of playing Warcraft Orcs & Humans, but if I were to try and play it now it would be basically unplayable due to missing features and functions that modern RTS games have accustomed me to.

CobrastanJorji• 5 years ago

How dare you! Needing to build roads was definitely a good design decision and not at all a pointless and irritating thing to try and optimize around.

hn_throwaway_99• 5 years ago

I expect Twitter likely has some data to support their move towards more complicated and longer tweets plus more features.

With regards to tweet length, they definitely do in the form of average tweet length based on different languages. Cant remember where they posted this data, but they found that in more "compact" languages (i.e. languages where you can put more meaning into fewer characters) almost all tweets were under the max length. For languages like English, though, a much higher percentage of tweets bumped up to the max length and then spilled into the next tweet. They basically then optimized the length so that, even when using less compact languages like English, the majority of ideas people wanted to share could fit in a single tweet.

slver3• 5 years ago

To me it was, of course everyone is free to see it their own way.

Every social network seems to evolve along the same lines. It starts with a clear concept of what it is, it gets popular based on it, then it starts getting lots of people, and lots of features, becomes a mess, so the timeline gets algorithmic, and suddenly all that's left of the original service is bunch of random noise from random people on your home page/app when you open it, but you keep doing it out of inertia.

Twitter was revolutionary because you DIDN'T have to read someone's long thought on whatever subject. Instead they were forced to keep it short.

You know the saying "I didn't have time to write a short letter so I wrote a long one"? It's funny, but it's true. It's very easy to spew garbage. Being succinct takes time.

ganafagol2• 5 years ago

The target group has changed.

Back in the day it was better for the geeks. They don't care about all that extra crap as much. But they do care about a simple API they can start hacking with and just drop a status line.

But today it's used by governments, election campaigns and presidents for important PR communication. And by grandma at home. They need those features and don't care about simplicity.

Target groups change as you grow. And that's also why often times original founders and engineers leave because it's not anymore the thing they signed up for. But they get replaced by other people.

swyx• 5 years ago

I think it's the only social network to have a char limit on posts? that simple feature, believe it or not, is a massive amount of its core value.

ganafagol2• 5 years ago

Which got watered down by doubling it, adding pictures/clips and threads.

Today people write whole articles in tweet threads. It's terrible.

c3534l• 5 years ago

This is the lifecycle for every business. You start out niche, exploiting underutilized and untapped markets and features to grow, then when you get big enough you can compete on scale, like those businesses you out-competed.

greggturkington• 5 years ago

And the official past tense was coined by Stephen Colbert when he told the hosts of The Today Show "I have twatted."

https://youtu.be/9PeUDX9_iLI

parentheses• 5 years ago

Twitter now supports AIM

Takes me back

vzaliva• 5 years ago

Compare Twitter open approach to Instagram. Instagram does not have public API and 3rd party clients. That prevent any outside innovation (but allows to keep ad revenue in-house).

grishka• 5 years ago

Instagram used to have a wide open API that allowed you to do every single thing except post. There were many apps and websites that made use of it in interesting ways. But then it was acquired by Facebook.

Twitter API is now also very much closed, deliberately incomplete, and requires staff approval before you can do anything at all.

Closing down the public API, or at least nerfing it enough to make third-party clients frustrating to use, is the common theme among all social media services that have the business model of eyeball-raping their users. If such a service would have a public API that's enough to build a third-party client, everyone will be using third-party clients, that would of course be much better than the official ones since they're not optimized for those stupid metrics, and thus not seeing ads, not participating in A/B tests for button colors and not sending the Very Important™ analytics.

programmarchy• 5 years ago

I'm pretty sure Noah Glass, a super early technical founder, came up with the name Twitter before mysteriously disappearing.

Twitter and Tweeter were the names of the extraterrestrial intelligent beings written about by Ted Owens, the famous "PK Man". Ted claimed he was given psychokinetic powers by these beings and explains how to contact them yourself in his book [1].

If you read Noah's timeline [2] starting from the earliest tweet, you can see that he was very far out, extremely poetic, possibly high, and frequently refers to entering a "chamber" for extended periods of time.

Coincidentally, in his book, Ted Owens instructs readers how to enter a "chamber" in order to visit Twitter and Tweeter and communicate with them via ESP.

My hypothesis is that Noah Glass, in his "chamber", was attempting to contact Twitter and Tweeter for guidance in his endeavor to create the early version of the platform he named.

Perhaps he succeeded in his attempt. And just maybe he's flying in a saucer somewhere in outer space right now! (Haha, only serious.)

[1] http://ufos.50webs.com/10_en.htm [2] https://twitter.com/noah

The origin of “tweet” at Twitter (2013)

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