Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution: Communication, Connections, and Immediacy—140 Characters at a Time

2 : Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution

On a rainy evening in March 2006, my partner, Tony,

came home after work excited. At the time, he was the

director of engineering at Odeo, a podcast startup, and

he hadn’t been energized by his days in a while. So I was

surprised when he rushed in talking about one of the

engineers in his group and said, “You’ve gotta try this

thing Jack cooked up. It’s addictive!”

The URL was www.twttr.com, and the page was white

with just a few words in a plain black font asking for my

mobile number. It took a few minutes to give Twttr my

information and get my phone set up with the service’s

SMS code, 40404. And then I started answering the ques-

tion Twttr asked: “What are you doing?”

Right away, that was fun and cool—I could use my

phone or laptop to let other people know what I was up

to, and they could find out anywhere they happened

to be. But then it got better: I could follow other people

on Twttr and learn about what they were thinking and

doing—anywhere I happened to be. And none of it

sucked up much time because Twttr limited messages

to 140 characters (which keeps each update and the

username that sent it within the 160-character limit of

a single SMS, or short message service, the communica-

tions protocol used for mobile-phone texting), and it let

me choose whose updates I was going to receive.

From the first day Twttr launched in private ...