FROM TWITTER TO X - THE JOURNEY

THE JOURNEY OF TWITTER (NOW X)

The year is 2006.

@Jack wrote the first tweet ever "Just setting up my twttr” at 9:50 pm on March 21, 2006, to create Twitter (now X).

There was no such thing as tweets, likes, retweets, hashtags, or mentions before that time. However, these words came to life because whatever must have been going on in Jack Dorsey’s head as an NYU student eventually became Twitter.

The Idea

Jack Dorsey originally thought of an SMS-based communication platform when he formed the idea of Twitter. He envisioned it to be a new online texting space where groups of friends or people could keep up with each other based on live status updates. He shared this idea with some coworkers at Odeo, a podcast company at the time.

Dorsey’s idea piqued the interest of Odeo’s co-founders, Evan Williams and Biz Stone who saw some potential and allowed Jack the opportunity to build it. When Dorsey’s thought went beyond ideation, the first version of the platform was called ‘Twttr’ – used solely by people who worked at Odeo.

Dropping the vowels in the name of companies and services at the time was a trendy way to gain domain-name advantage. For Dorsey’s idea, Noah Glass is credited with coming up with ‘Twttr’ and ‘Twitter’ as the original and latter names respectively.

Release

Twitter was formally released for public use on July 15th, 2006.

Remarkably, the website drew people’s interest as it started seeing around 20,000 tweets per day in the first months. Explosive growth came in 2007 at the ‘South’ by Southwest Interactive Conference where more than 60,000 tweets were sent per day at the event. The team at the event was savvy enough to take advantage of the viral nature of the conference and its attendees to make Twitter a hot topic.

Popularity

The recognition at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference possibly opened the doors of social media acceptance to Twitter. The website’s interaction grew to 300,000 tweets per day by the year 2008 and the geometric rise continued to become 50 million tweets per day by early 2010.

Twitter was simple. People saw it not only as a means of sharing messages and updates with friends. The platform was also one of the easiest ways for companies to advertise and interact with their customers. Traditional media hopped in on the action too by promoting hashtags and encouraging consumers to include them in their tweets to get certain topics trending.

On the side, Twitter handles quickly became a means of identifying an individual in both personal and professional settings.

Challenges

Twitter was not without challenges in its early days.

One early challenge was that team members racked up hundreds of dollars in SMS charges to their personal phone bills until they sorted that out (I have to ask @jack how).

Reports are that Odeo was going through rough times when the initial concept of Twitter was being tested. Apple's release of its podcasting platform dealt Odeo's business model a blow and the founders decided to buy their company back from the investors.

Facilitating the buyback meant they acquired and retained the rights to Twitter.

The challenge of rapid growth was also there in the early days. Twitter’s user base grew astonishingly. ?This meant frequent service timeouts due to capacity constraints. One hack that got the interest of the Twitter community was the use of an illustration on the screen by artist Yiying Lu (@YiyingLu) whenever the servers were down – a whale being lifted out of the water to safety by eight birds.

Twitter’s team used this image to acknowledge the problem and to show they were working on it. The strategy worked. The error page went viral within the Twitter community and the illustration took on the name "Fail Whale."

140-Character Limit. Why?

Twitter reasoned that a character limit was necessary since the platform was originally designed as an SMS-based platform.

140 characters was the limit that mobile carriers imposed with SMS protocol standards at the time. It served well as a matter of branding too since the idea was to share thoughts and relate with people in the easiest way possible.

Twitter decided in 2017 that the 140-character limit needed to change to accommodate the smartphone age. Users were pointing to it. So, the tweet limit for the platform was increased to 280 characters. This move was to also help Twitter users spend less time condensing their thoughts and to give them more expression.

Changing Text Narratives

Twitter bought into user innovation early on and used it to drive growth.

The team at Twitter allowed the community to experiment with new jargon and different ways to use the service. It shows active listening and product management.

Tagging, hashtags, and retweets were ingenious community ideas adopted by Twitter to sustain growth. For instance, users had no way of replying to each other when Twitter started so some users would tag or identify others with the @ symbol in a Tweet. ?The story with hashtags too followed the same path where members shared or hopped on trending topics that way. Both features are an integral part of the social media service’s ecosystem.

Activists Haven, Free Speech & Instant News

Activists have used Twitter to facilitate social movements and amplify the voices of incapacitated or harassed persons whether put at a disadvantage by state or individual actors. The platform has also acted as an alternative to censored outlets run by corporate and state-run media.

Twitter gained a massive popularity surge with the storied US Airways Flight 1549 landing on the Hudson River by pilot Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger. That one event set Twitter up as a top platform for sharing breaking and unaltered news or stories with people as instantly as it happened. On Jan. 15, 2009, Janis Krums was taking a ferry to New Jersey when he snapped a photo of the plane in the water and shared it with his 170 Twitter followers.

Dorsey mentioned in a 2013 interview with CNBC that the event dubbed the ‘Miracle on the Hudson’ changed everything for Twitter.

Twitter as a platform also led the way in the digital revolution of instantaneous news sharing with the Arab Springs situation across Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria. Real-time updates from these places kept people abreast of an almost undiluted report of happenings.

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement also gained popularity and pulled massive coordination and backing on Twitter, surging in popularity and exploding massively in May 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Donned as a hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter, Twitter was used to demand change and assert the position that racism is never an ideology to buy into.

Bots & The Need for Change

Twitter claimed to have 330 million active users in 2017. That was super social media strength in numbers. However, the figure claim proved to be inaccurate as a study done in 2020 pointed to bots as 15% of the platform’s active users.

Why bots? Persons behind bot accounts were using the platform to carry out phishing activities, spamming, fake engagement, and dubious acts.

By the end of the last decade, scams, fake news, and hate speech were prevalent on the platform, and that affected user trust and user experience. However, these activities did not deter growth.

Elon Musk and X

Elon Musk surfaced in October 2022 to buy Twitter for $44 billion – a shock move at the time. The purchase process was not easy either. The deal went through after a turbulent situation where Musk cited bots on the platform as a problem and tried to back out.

Musk hit the ground running when he took over. He laid off staff, changed the name from ‘Twitter’ to ‘X’ in 2023, introduced a paid subscription model to replace the previous verification system used by Twitter, and also made access on who sees the ‘likes’ of a user into a private feature. He has also introduced AI features to the platform – Grok AI.

These reforms don’t come without their challenges as Musk has been criticized for laying off almost 80% of staff when he took over. The introduction of the paid subscription feature too instead of the legacy verification system is said to open the platform to risks of impersonation and even more misinformation according to critics.

From Twitter to X, the dream and idea behind innovation, free speech and liberty of expression have been inarguably preserved. It remains to see the next steps in the journey of the tech platform.

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