The immenseley popular Social Media tool Twitter was founded in March 2006 by Evan Williams (@ev), Biz Stone (@Biz) and Jack Dorsey (@jack) who all worked at the podcasting company Odeo. The initial idea of Twitter however, started already in 2000 and came from a frustration from Jack Dorsey who was quite active at LiveJournal but wanted to create an even more ‘live’ journal: “Real-time, up-to-date, from the road.” He tried to slip the idea of live status updates into each project he was working on, but it was only at a daylong brainstorm at Odeo that he found the right people to start Twitter.

First Sketch of Twitter by Jack Dorsey

Twitter used to call Twttr - Mind the green logo.

As Odeo needed to lay off a few of the founding fathers of Twitter a new home for this instant status update-service was needed. Obvious was born and it had the sole purpose of being the incubator for Twitter (in April 2007 Twitter got its own company -Twitter inc- with Jack Dorsey as a CEO). For a long while Twitter stayed in private beta and had the opportunity to grow in close contact with (and thus with a lot of feedback from) a small number of first user and enthusiasts. Now, Twitter seems to be the new popular kid on the social media block as it has by one measure over 3 million accounts and, by another, well over 5 million visitors in September 2008, a fivefold increase in a month (source: wikipedia).

Trivia:

• There were no whales, nor birds in the beginning. The initial mascot was an indian (asian?) girl
• One of the initial team members Dom Sagolla is working on a book called “140 Characters
  A literary guide for terse content”
• The initial Twitter (or should I say twttr) colour was green
• The short code to send your message to the Twitter service was “89887″ (which reads TWTTR on the numeric pad of your cell phone). It was later changed to 40404 as this was much easier to remember
• The initial Twitter question to trigger action was not “What are you doing?” but the more informal “what are you up to?”

Indian (asian?) girl - the first mascot of Twitter

You’re on Twitter? Cool! I’m on Twitter too…

via: Wikipedia – 140 characters – Flickr

Social media play an important role in sharing experiences, thoughts, feelings … During Obama’s Inauguration Day a lot of people used social media to get/stay connected with others and thus being part of that historical day. Some numbers:

During Obama’s inauguration Twitter reported five times more tweets.

But also on YouTube, this week only 332 000 new videos  containing the tag “Obama” were uploaded and 17 000 with the tag “Inauguration”.`

The full report can be found on Mashable

Katrien already wrote on the perils of using Facebook. I now found an interesting work on using Facebook for activism. On the site of DigiActive, a volunteer organization dedicated to helping grassroots activists around the world use the Internet and mobile phones to increase their impact, you can find “Introduction to Facebook Activism” written by Dan Schultz.

Because of its massive user base and the free applications one can create and install Facebook is too interesting to ignore. This small guide (its only 15 pages long) contains some pro & cons of Facebook activism, a practical guide for setting up activists events and three examples of Facebookactivism: Monk’s protst in Burma, Help Fouad Campaign from Morocco and the Free Kareem Campaign from Egypt.

The most interesting content is off course the analysis of these three different campaigns as it gives an insight on how a sometimes spontaneous action evolves into a massivley supported cause on Facebook and what problems and questions could then pop up (for example, the lack of anonimity in these sometimes dangerous campaigns).

Download Introduction to Facebook Activism (pdf)

Source: DigiActive

In the intro of his Phd (Defending my Bastard Culture!) researcher Mirko Tobias Schäfer writes about two TIME-magazine covers depicting the man/woman/group/… of the year.

The first one is the well known cover from 2007. A computer screen is depicted and in fact mirrors the reader looking at the front cover. The text on the bottom of the page says it all… “Yes, You. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world”. Though this image has been widely used (and thus maybe loses a bit of its importance) it still is relevant as it refers to the so-called participatory culture (popularized under the term Web2.0).

The second one dates from 1983. Time Magazine did not elect a Person of the Year, but choose the computer as the Machine of the Year. The man in front of the computer is almost blanked out and sits alienated in front of the screen not even touching the keyboard.

Schäfer sees as a reason for this emancipatory evolution from a ‘machine in control’ to the ‘user in control’ the development of the computer as a work medium to a life-medium (work, leisure, friendship, family,…) and the great amount of content which ordinary users can publish online.

These are not ‘shocking’ conclusions, but the way they get depicted by these TIME-covers, covering almost 25 years, is beautifull & illustrative.

In a previous post I tried to debunk the term ‘social media’. I’ve claimed -in contrast to the Wikipedia-definition- social media has got nothing to do with technology or the internet.

As Dorien asked for more clarification I will focus on the telegraph as an example of social media.

The Hurrays (& Boo’s) each medium faces

“we are one!” said the nations, and hand met hand, in a thrill electric from land to land. (The Victory, 1872)

The Atlantic Telegraph – that instantaneous highway of thought between the Old and New worlds.  (Scientific American, 1858)

These quotes remind me of the quotes you heard at the beginning of the popularization of the internet or when after an O’Reilly-conference the term web2.0 was coined. Typical terms for that time were “information superhighway” (see above, that instantaneous highway of thought) or the co

ncept of “global village” connecting distant places beyond the borders of space and time.

The ‘code language’

We all know chat language or SMS langauge. It is an abbreviated form of the English

language to speed up the process of communication.

Most known examples are probably LOL for ‘laughing out loud’ or thx for ‘thanks’.

With the telegraph they also used these code language for fast and easy social contact:

I I stands for ‘I am ready’. An operator would use SFD (‘Stop For Dinner’) when he would take a break for dinner and one would use GM to wish the fellow-operators a Good Morning.

Human relationships

When the internet started to become mainstream we saw stories poppin up in popular press about

people meeting and eventually getting married via the internet. It was perceived as a miraculuous never-seen-before event that love emerged via your 56k-modem.

In his work “The Victorian Internet” Tom Standage refers to numerous stories of love over the wires. Most of them comes down to operators who in the after-hours started chatting (or playing board games like checkers) via the telegraph and eventually fell in love.
So, the only thing I wanted to tell in this and the previous post is that it’s not the internet or any other medium which is making us social, but it is the people using it (to have fast and easy communication, to find friendshiop and maybe even find love). All the buzz surrounding so-called web social media is not new and has been here before…

Source: The Victorian Internet