Yesterday, I launched my blog series on Twitter and Part 2 continues with the early days of Twitter.

Originally, Mobile access to the web was not as ubiquitous as it is today. Twitter existed as a website to be accessed from your computer, or you could link your cell phone number and use SMS to send text messages to Twitter. There were not many people on Twitter so you tended to follow your real life friends and would have device updates on. This feature is still available today, but with the exception of an important person that’s very low volume… most people will find the device update feature to be disruptive and find that mobile clients are far more effective at getting these notifications. There’s also an option to get your direct messages sent directly to your phone as well. I find that to be useful as I rarely get or send DMs and sometimes my phone won’t have data service but can receive SMS.

My Main Twitter Stream

With the onset and widespread adoption of Android (and I suppose I can give some credit to the iPhone as well), the SMS interface to twitter has largely faded away and has been replaced with mobile applications and desktop clients but I’ll save that for a later discussion on the Twitter API. Twitter’s major defining characteristic is the 140 character limit since SMS was designed to be the main interface. SMS messages are limited to 160 characters… leaving 20 characters for Twitter to include the username in the Tweet. I wonder how many people are not aware that and perceive it as an artificial limit.

Originally, you saw every single tweet from the people you follow. Originally where twitter currently asks “What’s happening?” was “What are you doing now?” and tweets were supposed to answer that question. Most people are confused at what you’re supposed to tweet and the original question led people to initially share what they were eating, bodily functions, or other minutia of our daily lives. Eventually the novelty wears off or they realize that people just don’t care about the details of their lives, but twitter is most useful when you share interesting things in your tweets.

Twitter’s first big splash was at South By Southwest, a technology oriented conference in Austin, Texas, when people could keep in touch with their friends and find out where friends were meeting for food or drinks… or sharing key points from an interesting talk. And that’s when the lightbulb turned on for people and Twitter began to take off. You can’t really explain to people the magic of Twitter; they need to experience for themselves.

Me being mentioned in a Tweet

As Twitter grew in popularity, the open ended nature of twitter allowed the community to innovate and establish standards. The first idea was a way to refer to another user on Twitter. Some clever person decided to use an “@” before a username to indicate that the following text was another user on Twitter. Soon after, it seemed natural to direct a tweet “at” someone by starting your message by mentioning their username (@username).

Eventually, the Twitter team realized this was a good convention and it became a de facto standard. They began linking these mentions to the users twitter page where you could read their tweets and decide to follow them. This was the primary way that people found interesting and influential people on twitter. And its also when people began using Twitter as an ubiquitous messaging platform. And was the first feature twitter implemented to allow you to control your twitter stream. At first, this was an optional feature you can change in the settings, but now… its on for everyone.

Since social circles never completely overlap, Twitter streams were becoming increasingly polluted with tweets that were directed at other users. You were offered three settings to limit tweets from entering your stream: View all tweets from your followers (original behavior), Filter out all tweets that are directed at another user (restrictive, but you won’t be distracted by conversations), or a balanced approach that filters out tweets directed at people you don’t follow (today’s behavior). This lead to a new way to use twitter as a communication platform. You could direct tweets at people without worrying about annoying people who aren’t already friends with that person, but still get the benefits of being able to see that a group of your friends are communicating.

The Fail Whale as seen on Twitter

Oh, and the initial design of twitter and the computing power required to processing the growing load and increasing complexity lead to the birth of the Fail Whale. Of course, back then… twitter just stopped responding rather then providing the well known image of failure. Twitter wasn’t designed to grow as quickly. Twitter’s in much better shape now, but there’s still hashtags, search and retweets to cover, but those will wait until the next installation of this blog series.