Categories
Interweb Musings Technology Writing

7 years of Twittering

2014-02-20 21.40.26

On this day (and time), 7 long years ago, I signed up for a little application called Twitter. Social Media, social networking, microblogging were not terms that were popular in those days and it was Twitter’s explosion at SXSW in 2007 that caught my attention and made me decide to try it out. It was an odd thing to use, as it forced users to be much more succinct than blogging, and you were not essentially communicating to any specific person like SMS services.

I was here,

  • Less than 1 year after the official launch on July 2006.
  • Just a little over 1 year from their founding date of March 2006.
  • One month after their wild popularity at SXSW in March 2007.

My Very First Tweet! #notmymostintelligenttweetunfortunately

firsttweet

Tweeting now is a lot simpler, cheaper (to non US / UK residents) and more meaningful than it used to be back in the early days (for me, at least). As an early adopter of this service, I’ve seen how Twitter can impact our daily lives and our social interactions, especially how it changes the way we accept how information is shared with us.

  • SMS shorthand

Unfortunately, I’m going to start with one of the annoying things that I believe is in part correlated to how users adapt to Twitter formats. Many of the newer users may not be aware that the reason why you are restricted in the number of characters in each tweet really goes back to how it was during the early days. There were 2 ways to send a twitter (as it was called in those days), via the web / via SMS to a UK based cell phone number. The 140 character limit that Twitter has is largely due to the restriction of characters in SMS. It had to be short to be able to be sent via SMS. This brevity means that if you want to say something a little longer than 140 characters, you had to get creative. So ins8 o typin in eng, u typ in shrthd so u cn put mre in a twttr dan norm. n typ lol so u cn luff.

[rant/] I remember I spent quite a bit of moolah on Twitter then, as we had to pay (~S$0.60) to send a tweet as it could only be sent via SMS to a UK number! For folks living in US or UK it was cheap, as they had local numbers to send to, but for all overseas users, each tweet actually cost us physical dollars. Plus, you get an SMS every time someone you follow tweets. So if you follow 10 people, and each person tweets 5 times a day, you would get 50 SMSes a day! It was so annoying that I even remember tweeting something like “People who twitter 3 times in a row needs to have a life.”. Imagine how invasive Twitter used to be without these mobile apps. [/rant]

  • Popularising of URL shortening services

This is definitely a result of Twitter. Even though URL shortening services were already available (Remember TinyURL?), their use was very much limited to sharing on IRC or for easy remembering. With the character limits of Twitter, if anyone wants to share links, it will be impossible to comment, as some article links just take up the full character limit. Thus services such as TinyURL became extremely useful. Why I believe Twitter is a mover in the URL shortening service world is really because TinyURL was launched in 2002, many years before Twitter, and it monopolised the URL shortening service ‘industry’. It had no competition, because usage was low. Then Twitter came about and with the character limit, the need for such services grew so much that many more blossomed, each domain getting shorter (bit.ly) and shorter (t.co). This is basic economics of demand and supply. Without Twitter users’ demand, TinyURL could be the sole supplier for more than 5 years, until that product could no longer satisfy the users’ needs (TinyURL’s shortened URL is 25 characters, yet bit.ly is 14 characters).

  • Instant information

What I mean by this is that before Twitter, we got opinions from blogs, news sites, forums; we got social updates from friends by texts, emails, phone calls, and meetups. With Twitter, there is instant updates about every thing they are doing, from what they are eating, reading, or watching; where they are going to; how they feel about the last meal they had… In the beginning, we didn’t know what to do with Twitter, so we over-shared.  It became a platform for regular people to be ‘famous’ by shouting out to the world. Then regular folks started getting into conversations with people they followed. People started sharing news and information about the things that are happening around the world. 2009 was an incredible year for Twitter. Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) realised the brand enhancing power of Twitter and ballooned to 1M followers. Barack Obama won the US Presidential Election. Michael Jackson died. These news were spreading like wildfire and for the first time since the launch, Twitter found itself a new path. Even the company realised it, and changed the question asked to “What’s happening?”, instead of the previous “What are you doing?”

Whatever the type, these are all information. News, gossip, sightings, tips, all information that we can get as soon as the incident happens. There is no waiting a day for the newspapers to write it up, or the bloggers to draft a post analysing the situation. Everyone can be a reporter, posting updates on the fly. If you didn’t read it on Twitter when it happened, you would be getting ‘old’ news, because everybody else would have (I’m exaggerating, of course). This is sometimes to the point if you hear a rumour on the streets, your best bet would be to search Twitter. If it’s word on the streets, you bet it was tweeted first.

 

In any case, with this Anniversary, I became curious about how Twitter has grown over the years and their major changes and milestones. I can’t say I’ve watched Twitter grow up, as the cost put me off a bit, till I got a smartphone & Twitter got an app; but then work piled up, and the excuses went on… Now that Twitter has grown to the mammoth it is right now, and I’m back more actively in various forms, I went back in time to see what everyone else is saying on the internet. 

Dr 4ward posted a really interesting infographic of Twitter since it officially launched. I’m a bit curious why his number of registered users state that it’s 1.3M registered users in March 2008, when my Twitter ID seems to be #3,189,741… I’ve assumed that the Twitter ID is allocated sequentially, but a variety of possibilities could account for Dr 4ward’s numbers, such as deleted / suspended accounts, engineering test accounts etc. Though I have to say, the numbers are quite massive. Possibly Twitter did a major account wipe-out of dead accounts?

Matthew Panzarino (@panzer) from The Next Web created a new Twitter account to look at Twitter from an entirely new light.. I absolutely agree with what he says about handles deviating from the person’s names. When we were first asked to create a handle, all we could think of was just using our names, or variations of our names.. There were a lot of @jack @crystal @mhofner around.. Nowadays, you get more complicated handles

Newsweek hits the nail on the head back in 2007, when the article discussed Twitter, the lure and the potential.

More history of Twitter infographics on Mashable (@mashable). I love infographics!

Ah.. the good old times…

Categories
Interweb Technology

Hi Cory! Welcome to my Twitter

What’s it with Mayors following people on Twitter. First it was Arnie, now Cory Booker (Mayor of Newar, NJ). I didn’t know I was popular in USA.

Image003
Categories
Technology

Another Twitter update beta?

Twitter seems to be rolling out a lot of updates recently, first lists and now this new retweet function? I like the fact that now I can retweet with a click on Twitter’s web interface.

Never understood why all other Twitter applications were able to do that but not the actual Twitter website.. That was dumb.

Categories
Interweb Technology

Twitter Lists (Beta)

So I’m not supposed to tweet about it.. But they didn’t say I wasn’t supposed to blog about it! Haha!

Anyway, tons of people have already flouted the pretty please note from the Twitter team andtweeted about it anyhow so by blogging instead of tweeting about it, I’m following their plea! XD

So lists.. lists.. It’s a cool new feature that twitter has added to their functionality.. Basically you create groups of those you are following so that you can narrow down to only reading tweets from them.. It’s a great way that you can manage all those tweets you receive every minute of your day! Personally I think it’s going to be extremely useful if you follow a ton of people.. It effectively helps you to cut out those that are not important, especially if you don’t have much time but want to still catch up with what their friends / a select group of people are doing.

Having gone using plurk for a while but I still prefer the user interface of Twitter. Not to mention that there are more exciting things going on here too. Plurk is still useful to me because of the friends active there, and being more a Chinese version of twitter, to connect with mainly my TW friends.

Now I have to go dig out more people to follow on Twitter!

Categories
Review Technology

So I’m on Google Wave now

I’ve probably never been so excited to see an invite appear in my email… Last night though, right in the middle of class, I was so excited I wanted to pump my fist in the air and shout HELL YEAH!

Because I saw this (Thanks Vic!):

Accepting this invitation was probably the highest point in my day.

So this… is how Google Wave actually looks like:

I’m still exploring the various functions, some of it is not available right now, like uploading files in waves. However, an overview of what Wave can potentially do is listed (with a video from the Product Managers too — 8 mins to watch!) in the screenshot below:

But you know what the BEST WAY to see what Wave can do? Watch This Video NOW!

I think that really sums up the potential of wave. It’s awesome! There’s so much you can do on it I think Gmail will soon be old news. Then again, I’m sure there are still folks who are still using ICQ or even MiRC so I would think normal email will still be very much alive. Gotta preach Wave though. Wave evangelist! (haha)

But I have only one friend to wave with for now. So essentially, this is a preview of previews. Can’t use much of the awesome functionalities without contacts to test them out with. XD

Last note, if you want that elusive invite, I can’t get it for you now… No invite wave as yet (see below screencap). But you can register your interest in the comments and if I do get it, I’ll see if I can nominate you too! Afterall, good things are meant to be shared!

Thanks again Victoria!

Okay now back to watching the 10,000 videos to tell me how cool Wave is. XD

Edit:

More Google Wave resources:

The Top 11 Google Wave Robots for the Enterprise – Just added the Tweety robot. It syncs with Twitter real time!

Mashable – Google Wave: A Complete Guide