Happy Birthday Twitter - Twitter is Five on March 21 - First Tweet in 2006 @jack - “just setting up my twttr.” -
For Dom Sagolla, the future began on a slide at a children’s playground.
One afternoon in March of 2006, Mr. Sagolla was in South Park, a popular community garden located just a few blocks from AT&T Park, the home stadium of the San Francisco Giants.
He was listening to Jack Dorsey — his colleague at a San Francisco podcasting startup known as Odeo — outline his vision for a new communications service that would allow users to broadcast short bursts of information no longer than 140 characters to a group of people via text message.
A short while later, on March 21, 2006 at 9:50 p.m. PST, Mr. Dorsey would send the first message using the new technology: “just setting up my twttr.”
It wasn’t long before Mr. Sagolla realized the potential of the group’s latest creation. Later that evening, with one of his first messages on the service, he let his feelings be known.
“oh this is going to be addictive.”
Mr. Sagolla is Twitter user No. 9.
“Jack described it as a way to make it so easy to write that you don’t even think about it, you just write,” Mr. Sagolla said in an interview with the National Post.
“When did I realize that it had this potential? I think from the first moment I used it.”
Five years later, Twitter is no longer simply a quirky micro-blogging service used only by the Silicon Valley in-crowd. Twitter Inc. now forms the backbone of a global communications network that connects more than 200 million users around the world — with another 460,000 signing up every day — sending in excess of a billion tweets per week.
It is used by journalists and athletes. By activists and relief workers. By politicians and porn stars. It helped put President Barack Obama in the White House and gave rise to the television show S**t my Dad Says. The United States Library of Congress archives every public Twitter message and it has played a central role in political uprisings in Iran and Egypt.
Indeed, in just 60 months, Twitter has altered the very fabric of the Internet and changed the way we consume information. For its most dedicated users, Twitter is their primary source of news, whether they’re tweeting from their mobile phone or their computer.
It is now the gold standard of real time digital information, a perpetually updating ticker of news, sports and your social life, streaming by in mind size chunks.
In a response to questions from the Post, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in an email that Twitter’s arrival as a cultural force happened by steps, not a single breakthrough event. “There have been many such moments; it’s hard to pin down just one. Very early on, there was an earthquake in San Francisco, and noticing the way my friends were asking each other if they were OK alerted me to the potential that we could have later in other events,” he wrote.
No comments:
Post a Comment