From now on, the struggle will not be over mechanical control of the means of information, but over spin-control of the zeitgeist.
It’s tough to get into the dictionary; it takes both time and widespread usage. If a term has the cachet and sticking power to last generations, it could see the pages of Merriam-Webster, but if it’s just a flash in the pan, it’ll fade away before linguists have a chance to enshrine it.
When the Oxford English Dictionary elevated “tweet” to dictionary-defined status in 2013, it did more than add yet another internet word to the annals of written English. Twitter had only adopted “tweet” in 2008, following a 2007 suggestion from engineer Blaine Cook to founder Craig Hockenberry. In quickly affirming the term’s usage and forgoing the OED’s typical 10-year waiting period, the English language’s user manual highlighted just how influential the service already was.
What you might not know about early Twitter
Like all the SMS charges devs racked up during testing
In ancient times, when carriers still charged per text message, Twitter was already more than just a website — it had an API early on, which ultimately contributed to some of the first Google-developed mobile apps. It was that API you could tweet through for years by sending an SMS message (to the number 40404 in the US), a practically Luddite solution by today’s standards.
Behind the scenes, early Twitter developers bet big on their work, routinely racking up hundreds of dollars on their personal phone bills from testing and retesting the in-progress service. Well before the final SMS functions were canned globally in 2019, text message costs around the globe had dropped considerably, and smartphone access increased drastically, yet security concerns meant it was time to move on.
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But text messages were more than a huge budget sink for the social media startup. For years, SMS provided users in less developed and well-off regions access to the same public forum as the rest of the world. And the 160-character SMS limit literally defined the quick-wit framework of modern short-form blogging — the originally allotted 140 characters for tweets was to save 20 characters of the SMS for usernames.
The mysterious origin of Twitter mobile apps
Or at least somewhat unexpected
Twitter certainly had the talent and means to develop its first apps from the ground up, but it actually didn’t. It acquired iOS app Tweetie (origin of the now-ubiquitous “pull to refresh” gesture) from former Apple employee Loren Brichter and refreshed it, making the first official iPhone app essentially Tweetie 3.0.
In a 2024 podcast with Lightspeed Venture Partners, former Twitter engineer Sara Beykpour mentioned how Google provided Twitter’s first Android app. As it set the stage for the Android Open Source Project to compete with Apple, Google’s engineers were tasked with prototyping front-end software for the most popular upcoming services of the day, including Twitter.
During that development, Google made specific efforts to follow its earliest, then-most informed best practices, rendering the first Android Twitter software a meaningful stepping stone to modern mobile app development.
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When its demographic-spanning user base made the most of 140 characters
The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people.
People of wildly different social, economic, political, and personal persuasions often deride “the media” for biased or sensationalist coverage, but what if that media was made up of everyday people?
That’s the question Twitter asked as it skyrocketed in popularity over its first few years. The 2007 SXSW conference saw daily tweets triple to 60,000, and the platform was off to the races. A year later, 300,000 tweets were born each day, a number that grew to a whopping 50 million by 2010.
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Millions of daily users worldwide meant the public had an army of witnesses, spotlighting everything from fashion faux pas to global catastrophes at a moment’s notice. Twitter users-turned-reporters delivered up-close, to-the-minute stories that shifted between eye-opening, amusing, and outright life-changing.
- Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson breaks the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death: Because, of course, a jacked-up, typecast, pro wrestler-turned-movie-star first documents the elimination of a generationally infamous terrorist (no disrespect to Mr. Johnson).
- Social media, including Twitter, play a role in protests and aftermath of the Arab Spring uprising: Twitter and Facebook didn’t cause widespread protests across the Arab world seeking the end of authoritarianism and human rights abuses. But they did make a difference, which some speculate relates to Middle Eastern leaders’ support for Musk’s takeover.
- “Black lives matter” becomes a nationwide rallying cry after the killings of Travyon Martin and George Floyd, 7 years apart: The ensuing community building, protest organization, and law enforcement accountability tracking couldn’t have happened without grassroots social media like Twitter.
- The #MeToo movement exposes rampant abuse of power in the entertainment industry: Originally born in 2006, #MeToo brought sexist abuses to light after decades of coverup. While some claim the movement failed, change takes time, and its 2017 resurgence offered women everywhere a chance to speak their truth.
Twitter also lets professionals engage directly with the public in new ways. Politicians, scientists, journalists, and marketing professionals never had as clear a window into their followers’ mindset as in Twitter’s heyday. Similarly, it’s never been easier to meet your favorite celebrities, for better or worse.
Elon Musk and the future of Twitter
Do we really want X to reach middle age?
On October 28, 2022, Elon Musk accidentally bought Twitter for $44 billion.
Maybe he just wanted to ban that kid tracking his jet. Maybe he wanted to silence the plebeians and their social movements. Maybe he honestly thought he knew best for the platform. Maybe he simply had more money than he knew what to do with (ignoring the billions in collateral he had to pony up to get the cash).
Under Musk’s inimitable, wise leadership, US Twitter users dropped by 30%. Advertisers fled the platform to avoid being seen alongside problematic content. “For you” feeds, once highly personalized, now usually contain some Musk tweets, a bit of anti-vaccine propaganda, some political grifting, and little content users actually want.
Here are just some of the problems exacerbated since Mr. Musk’s purchase:
- The complete ruination of the formerly identity-verifying blue checkmarks
- Misleading and restrictive labeling of certain media outlets
- Questionable bans of outspoken journalists
- An inability to curtail bot influence
- Accusations of targeted censorship and shadowbans
- An utter lack of customer service and media relations
Grok: another AI summarizer nobody asked for
Not every Twitter user cares much about affecting social transformation, and that’s fine. But the most insightful and interesting users migrated to other platforms like Mastodon, and the user base — who once benefited from grassroots firsthand accounts — now have less reason to scroll Twitter.
But we’re now creating a surveillance society where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless.
— Jon Ronson, 2015
What happens to Twi—I mean, X as years progress, and it proves a back-alley echo chamber with amoral-at-best values and moderation? The site probably won’t shut down anytime soon, but it no longer runs on freewheeling individuals with often honest intentions and insights into the world.
That’s bad news for the rest of us; we’ll just have to work harder to build a better community and reach each other through different platforms.
