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]<p>[0] <a href="https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/update-twitter-finally-lands-coveted-tweet-trademark-30458" rel="nofollow">https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/update-twitter-finally-lan...</a>
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.<p>They've since doubled their length and add bunch of meta information on every post, rendering it basically indistinguishable from any other social network.<p>Twitter today is running on network effects and brand recognition, not core value. That core value is gone.
I'm pretty sure Noah Glass, a super early technical founder, came up with the name Twitter before mysteriously disappearing.<p>Twitter and Tweeter were the names of the extraterrestrial intelligent beings written about by Ted Owens, the famous "PK Man". Ted claimed he was given psychokinetic powers by these beings and explains how to contact them yourself in his book [1].<p>If you read Noah's timeline [2] starting from the earliest tweet, you can see that he was very far out, extremely poetic, possibly high, and frequently refers to entering a "chamber" for extended periods of time.<p>Coincidentally, in his book, Ted Owens instructs readers how to enter a "chamber" in order to visit Twitter and Tweeter and communicate with them via ESP.<p>My hypothesis is that Noah Glass, in his "chamber", was attempting to contact Twitter and Tweeter for guidance in his endeavor to create the early version of the platform he named.<p>Perhaps he succeeded in his attempt. And just maybe he's flying in a saucer somewhere in outer space right now! (Haha, only serious.)<p>[1] <a href="http://ufos.50webs.com/10_en.htm" rel="nofollow">http://ufos.50webs.com/10_en.htm</a>
[2] <a href="https://twitter.com/noah" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/noah</a>
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.
Compare Twitter open approach to Instagram. Instagram does not have public API and 3rd party clients. That prevent any outside innovation (but allows to keep ad revenue in-house).
And the official past tense was coined by Stephen Colbert when he told the hosts of The Today Show "I have twatted."<p><a href="https://youtu.be/9PeUDX9_iLI" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/9PeUDX9_iLI</a>
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.