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

“When the telephone connection between these two terminals is made, the newest form of electronic journalism lights up Mr Howards television.”

Maybe something which has few links with social media or online customisation (the two major themes of this blog), but Robin Wauters (Techcrunch, Plugg.eu,…) posted an intersting and -in my view- entertaining video from 1981. In the video above you can watch a news report from these prehistoric internet days. Journalist Steve Newman investigates a new system (called The Electronic Examiner) which connects home computers with a server. After two hours of downloading (!) you could read the newspaper (“With the exception of pictures, ads, and the comics” ). User Richard Halloran (who “owns a home computer”, the caption in the news report says) seems quite satisfied with the service.

The Electronic Examiner was thus launched some twenty years before Krishna Barat, a principal scientist at Google, would develop Google News (and it was some 25 years before Google News left its beta phase).

via: Robin Wauters – Techcrunch

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.