[HN Gopher] The origin of "tweet" at Twitter (2013)
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The origin of "tweet" at Twitter (2013)
Author : pcr910303
Score : 58 points
Date : 2021-05-05 03:16 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (furbo.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (furbo.org)
| [deleted]
| jonny_eh wrote:
| 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-
| lan...
| LasangaCode wrote:
| The same goes for all social medias. They're all-user generated
| content.
| dang wrote:
| I don't think the GP was talking about content so much as how
| Twitter's features were shaped in the early years, by
| formalizing how users were creatively adapting the site.
| Twitter stood out that way.
| codemac wrote:
| Not true at all - stories ala Snapchat were not invented by
| users.
|
| Twitter was (but no longer) awesome by allowing folks to
| consume plain text with socially agreed upon meaning rather
| than features of the client. It's my feeling that instead of
| piling on more metadata into the posts, they could have done
| something more similar to RES on reddit, and expanded the
| text limit.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I wanna know who supplanted PM with DM.
|
| It's PM god damnit!
| hbosch wrote:
| PMs imply privacy.
| nkozyra wrote:
| They're also known as "Personal" Messages
| simlevesque wrote:
| Never heard this before, but personal seems like another
| word for private in this case.
| nextstep wrote:
| It's too bad the system isn't collectively owned by the users.
| Graffur wrote:
| 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.
| ivanche wrote:
| They have got to be kidding! "Tweet" as a word appeared at least
| in 1952. [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweety
| rossitter wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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".
| twobitshifter wrote:
| I wonder if Twitter compensated the icon factory for coming up
| with the bird mascot?
| jonny_eh wrote:
| His tweet at the end that is supposed to be the first to be
| tagged with a source other than web... says web?
| slver wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Let's make a 32 char Twitter...
| minikites wrote:
| 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.
| donohoe wrote:
| Sure, but in this case it was a Twitter developer, Blaine Cook,
| that suggested the word "tweet"
| cbozeman wrote:
| 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.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| *patent not parent
| nielsbot wrote:
| "probably almost never" :)
| bigth wrote:
| 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.
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