6 ms·

The origin of “tweet” at Twitter (2013)

120 points by pcr910303 5y ago

ivanche 5y ago
They have got to be kidding! "Tweet" as a word appeared at least in 1952. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweety
- rossitter 5y ago
  The word "tweet" wasn't added to the OED, just a new meaning of it. Two entries for "tweet" (one for the verb, one for the noun and interjection) have been in the OED since 1916, with citations going back to the 16th century.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  Come on. You can understand from context that Craig is talking about using "tweet" to mean "a post on Twitter", not claiming that he literally invented the word "tweet".
minikites 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
    "probably almost never" :)
  - bigth 5y 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.
  - filmgirlcw 5y 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.
    - nceqs3 5y ago
      *patent not parent
      - filmgirlcw 5y ago
        I’ll blame the the fact that I typed that in a moving car (I wasn’t the driver) and autocorrect is a bitch.
- donohoe 5y ago
  Sure, but in this case it was a Twitter developer, Blaine Cook, that suggested the word "tweet"
- dmos62 5y 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 5y ago
I wonder if Twitter compensated the icon factory for coming up with the bird mascot?
Graffur 5y 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_eh 5y ago
His tweet at the end that is supposed to be the first to be tagged with a source other than web... says web?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jonny_eh 5y 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-lands-coveted-tweet-trademark-30458 https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/update-twitter-finally-lan...
- nextstep 5y ago
  It’s too bad the system isn’t collectively owned by the users.
- Workaccount2 5y ago
  I wanna know who supplanted PM with DM. It's PM god damnit!
  - hbosch 5y ago
    PMs imply privacy.
    - nkozyra 5y ago
      They're also known as "Personal" Messages
      - simlevesque 5y ago
        Never heard this before, but personal seems like another word for private in this case.
        nkozyra 5y ago
        From Wikipedia: "A private message, personal message, or direct message (abbreviated as PM or DM) is a private communication channel between users on any given platform. " They are all private in terms of intended recipients. They're not cryptographically protected.
  - 5y ago
slver 5y 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 5y 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.
  - slver 5y ago
    Let's make a 32 char Twitter...
  - thinkingemote 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
greggturkington 5y 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 https://youtu.be/9PeUDX9_iLI
parentheses 5y ago
> Twitter now supports AIM Takes me back
vzaliva 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 http://ufos.50webs.com/10_en.htm [2] https://twitter.com/noah https://twitter.com/noah

120 points by pcr910303 5y ago

They have got to be kidding! "Tweet" as a word appeared at least in 1952. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweety

rossitter 5y ago
The word "tweet" wasn't added to the OED, just a new meaning of it. Two entries for "tweet" (one for the verb, one for the noun and interjection) have been in the OED since 1916, with citations going back to the 16th century.
chipotle_coyote 5y ago
Come on. You can understand from context that Craig is talking about using "tweet" to mean "a post on Twitter", not claiming that he literally invented the word "tweet".

minikites 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
  "probably almost never" :)
- bigth 5y 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.
- filmgirlcw 5y 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.
  - nceqs3 5y ago
    *patent not parent
    - filmgirlcw 5y ago
      I’ll blame the the fact that I typed that in a moving car (I wasn’t the driver) and autocorrect is a bitch.
donohoe 5y ago
Sure, but in this case it was a Twitter developer, Blaine Cook, that suggested the word "tweet"
dmos62 5y 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 5y ago

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

Graffur 5y 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_eh 5y ago

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

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jonny_eh 5y 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-lands-coveted-tweet-trademark-30458 https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/update-twitter-finally-lan...

nextstep 5y ago
It’s too bad the system isn’t collectively owned by the users.
Workaccount2 5y ago
I wanna know who supplanted PM with DM. It's PM god damnit!
- hbosch 5y ago
  PMs imply privacy.
  - nkozyra 5y ago
    They're also known as "Personal" Messages
    - simlevesque 5y ago
      Never heard this before, but personal seems like another word for private in this case.
      - nkozyra 5y ago
        From Wikipedia: "A private message, personal message, or direct message (abbreviated as PM or DM) is a private communication channel between users on any given platform. " They are all private in terms of intended recipients. They're not cryptographically protected.
- 5y ago

slver 5y 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 5y 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.
- slver 5y ago
  Let's make a 32 char Twitter...
- thinkingemote 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.

greggturkington 5y 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 https://youtu.be/9PeUDX9_iLI

parentheses 5y ago

> Twitter now supports AIM Takes me back

vzaliva 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 http://ufos.50webs.com/10_en.htm [2] https://twitter.com/noah https://twitter.com/noah