IDEA No 83
MICROBLOGGING
There have been Tweets from parliament, the Vatican, space and the womb. It has caused governments to fall and society to change. And it was all put together in two weeks in 2006 by a bunch of people who should have been doing something else.
Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter.
While other kids were interested in trains and Lego, Jack Dorsey was interested in how cities worked. In particular, he loved couriers. So much so that in 1992, at the age of 16, he started a bicycle messenger service of his own: ‘I put my brother and me on bikes, just so I could write the dispatch software.’ He quickly found out that St. Louis had no need for bicycle couriers, but the software he created is still used by courier companies today.
In 1997, during the second year of an engineering degree in Missouri, Dorsey came across a New York Citybased company called Dispatch Management Services, which managed dispatch centres for couriers. Two weeks later he had moved to New York and was writing software for them. It was his dream job. ‘We had couriers on CB radios, on PDAs and on cell phones. We had taxis and emergency vehicles with GPS. They’re all reporting constantly where they are and what work they’re doing and it’s all flowing into this one system that a dispatcher can view in real time on a map. That’s what’s going on in the city! I wanted that same thing for my friends.’
Dorsey was a keen user of instant messaging, which he loved, but it was tied to his desktop computer. One sleepless night he created a program that allowed him to send updates from his RIM 850, one of the first two-way pagers. The idea for Twitter had been born.
After a brief period running his own software company, training as a massage therapist and pursuing a career in botanical illustration, Dorsey decided to get back into programming. He joined Odeo, a podcasting company set up by Evan Williams, who had launched Blogger, the first blog platform (see Blogging). One of Dorsey’s co-workers introduced him to SMS and he saw that it was a perfect platform for his updates program. SMS would restrict his service to 160 characters – 140 if you reserved 20 for the user address, but so what? Status updates were short and punchy anyway.
Dorsey and his team set to work on a prototype and two weeks later, on 21 March 2006, Dorsey sent the first Tweet, ‘inviting coworkers’. The understated request was reminiscent of Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone call 130 years earlier: ‘Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.’ Like the telephone, the impact of Twitter would be enormous. Not that everybody recognized it at the time.
TechCrunch reviewed the service in July that year. Some of the comments make great reading, one post reads, ‘I think this is the dumbest thing ever! Who would want all their personal text messages on a public website for anyone to read and track?’ Good question, Justin. About a billion of us, since you ask. Despite some initial scepticism, the service began to catch on, and in 2007 Twitter span out of Odeo as a separate company, with Dorsey at the helm.
There are now half a billion Tweets a day, ranging from the inane to the profound. What they all share is their intrinsically democratic nature. They are uncensored and immediate. From the Arab Spring to the reporting of ice on Mars, Twitter has fundamentally changed the way in which we create and consume news.■
Pope Benedict’s first Tweet, on 12 December 2012.