Twitter Turns Ten Today: What It Changed, and What It Couldn't

Its influence reaches far beyond the news

March 21, 2006:

11:50 @jack: just setting up my twttr

11:51 @biz: just setting up my twttr

...five more identical messages...

12:01 @ev: just setting up my twttr

12:01 @jack: inviting coworkers

Ten years ago today, a few employees of a company called Odeo typed these lines into a new website called twttr. The Twitter story began with this trivial, boring exchange.

The ten years that followed were a roller coaster.

Twitter has been dismissed as a pointless way to waste time and hailed as a channel that carried the pulse of the planet. For at least two years, researchers argued over whether it was a media company or a medium. At its peak it was seen as Facebook's equal; today it is fighting to survive.

What is Twitter now? Under Jack Dorsey, the company has just cleared out its management team and is asking again what the product really is.

Twitter is worth revisiting, and not only because it has a Chinese imitator in Sina Weibo. The timeline of WeChat Moments, the flood of fragmented information we now handle without thinking, even the influencer economy: all of it traces back, in some measure, to that trivial exchange ten years ago today.

Ten years after the first tweet, here is what Twitter changed, and what it didn't.

Twitter wrote the first template for mobile apps

In 2006 the internet was a different world.

MySpace, the homepage-and-blog site you may never have used, was still alive. Apple's first iPhone hadn't appeared yet. The few smartphone apps of the day, such as Palm's and BlackBerry's BBM, were scattered across individual handset makers, much as PC software was.

Odeo's planned podcasting business had just collapsed, because Apple had beaten it to the idea with iTunes. So founder Ev Williams held an internal hackathon: employees paired up and had two weeks to build a new product.

Engineer Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone, who handled brand marketing, teamed up. They wanted to make a small tool for socializing with friends on a phone.

Dorsey worked out what the product would be: a service for posting your "status," where you could update your own and see your friends' updates too. This is their first design sketch:

And here is how the homepage read when the site launched in 2006: "Use Twttr to stay in touch with your friends all the time. If you have a phone and can send text messages, you'll never be bored again!"

Back then, once you linked your Twitter account to your phone number, you could post updates by text message, up to 140 characters each.

Twitter looked very different then, but its basics haven't changed: the "timeline," and posting from a phone.

This was Twitter's timeline in 2006, with friends' messages listed newest first. It looked rather like an RSS reader subscribed to many friends, except that every message was capped at 140 characters, so each could be shown in full.

That was the foundation of Twitter's success.

You didn't have to move the mouse up, down, left and right to find things; you just kept scrolling down. That made it ideal for small screens.

The layout was also unusually clean for its time. Look at what other sites looked like then:

Before Twitter, mobile sites copied the big blocks of color from their PC versions, or simply listed heaps of news links. That was how news sites did it.

Today almost everyone has switched to the clean timeline Twitter started with, including Facebook's own timeline, News Feed.

Twitter gave people a reason to go to bed holding their phones

The Twitter team was hooked on the site from launch, but they weren't sure this little cure for boredom could become a real business until South by Southwest in 2007.

The festival was crowded and chaotic, with hundreds of talks and concerts, so many people used Twitter to compare sessions. During one talk, Biz Stone noticed that more than half the audience had walked out. Someone had been live-tweeting and recommending a different session. The same thing happened with bars: one person posted a tip about a quiet bar, and ten minutes later it was packed.

Before Twitter, the popular information tools on phones stopped at Palm and BlackBerry, and nobody got hooked on those. They were mostly devices your company gave you so you could answer email on the road.

And now? On the bus you can see a friend heading into the delivery room, learn that an earthquake struck the other side of the world a minute ago, and watch your team fall behind...

"Whatever you're doing, whatever you're about to do, whatever you've just done, whatever your cat is doing, Twitter spreads these 'atoms' across the internet on equal terms. It has created a new kind of content: smaller, more trivial, and easier to produce than a personal blog. So expect this kind of interaction to explode."

That is from a piece Lev Grossman wrote for Time in 2010, reflecting on our addiction to data.

It also shows how popular Twitter was at the time. Outside of games, it was the first service the general public got hooked on and turned into a habit.

Twitter showed the world that text on a phone could be content worth consuming, something to fill every spare three minutes.

Today different services do that job in different places: Facebook in the US; WeChat Moments, Weibo and Toutiao in China.

Twitter was no model startup, but openness saved it

Early on, Twitter happened to catch the smartphone boom and people's growing appetite for content other than games. Its user numbers climbed fast:

But by any measure, early Twitter looked nothing like Facebook or Microsoft, tech giants that caught a shift in their era.

Gates was among the first founders to see, and say out loud, that the PC would turn software into an industry. Microsoft then used Windows to grow from an IBM supplier into the giant that unified the PC industry. Once Windows was everywhere, Microsoft pushed Office into the workplace, where it has stayed for twenty years. That is what Gates did in more than 20 years running Microsoft. Twitter never showed that kind of foresight or execution.

Instead, much of Twitter's early years went into changing its leadership. By 2011 it still had no official mobile app, but it was already on its third CEO.

Twitter's CEOs over the years

2007

Jack Dorsey becomes Twitter's first CEO

2008

Co-founder Ev Williams pushes Dorsey out and becomes the second CEO

2010

The board, frustrated that Williams was too slow to make money and commercialize, makes Dick Costolo the third CEO

2015

With the share price still falling, Costolo resigns

2015

Jack Dorsey returns as CEO

Yet Twitter never lacked mobile apps, because it chose to be open.

It opened its API back in 2006. Developers only had to embed Twitter's code in their own apps to build services that posted to Twitter directly.

And it wasn't only apps. Almost every Twitter feature that other social networks now copy came from users, not from the Twitter team: the "@" for replies, "RT" for retweets, the "#" that marks a topic.

The team quietly watched how people used the service, then built the most popular symbols into the product.

In 2011, a Wall Street Journal reporter asked Dorsey a simple question: what exactly is Twitter?

"It's a different thing to different people at different times. We don't have an answer, and that's OK."

He said it in a positive spirit. He meant: Twitter is whatever you use it for.

That open, flexible design made Twitter an outlier, and it was undeniably ahead of its time.

Today every American tech company of any size offers at least some openness. Even Facebook, long criticized for being closed, has opened part of its social graph.

Thanks to Twitter, anyone, famous or not, can bypass the media and build a following

Another clever Twitter invention was the "Follow." Following someone doesn't put you in a two-way relationship with them. It means you subscribe to what they say, and you can even talk back.

One-way following made gathering an audience much cheaper. Many people began building a following on Twitter through what they said and how they said it. Whatever their day job, they could easily go around traditional media and speak for themselves.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk understands this better than almost anyone.

In February 2013, New York Times reporter John Broder wrote about a disappointing drive in a Tesla electric car from Washington to New York. The piece, "Stalled Out on Tesla's Electric Highway," made Musk furious.

He didn't ask another outlet to run a story setting the record straight. He fought it out on Twitter, posting reams of trip-log data from the test drive to show where Broder was wrong.

Musk isn't the only one. Barack Obama used Twitter the same way in the 2008 election, speaking straight to voters.

You don't even need to be a CEO or a politician.

Take the columnist Ben Thompson. He started out as someone who had worked at a few tech companies and liked writing business commentary on Twitter and his blog.

Today Thompson runs a weekly free blog and a paid site (US$100 a year) that publishes an article every day. He has thousands of subscribers around the world, and he talks with them mostly on Twitter.

Before Twitter, only someone famous enough to draw at least a few hundred thousand people could turn themselves into a business. Thompson has fewer than 40,000 followers on Twitter.

By making it simple to follow someone, Twitter changed for good what it means to gather an audience.

Twitter became a news channel, but in the end it didn't change the news

In 2010 and 2011, while Facebook was still struggling to move its desktop users onto its mobile app, Twitter was already being called "the pulse of the planet."

The hottest question about Twitter then was whether it would replace traditional news organizations.

It started with the 2009 "Miracle on the Hudson." As the plane came down on the river, Twitter user @manolantern took a photo with his phone, posted it, and added two sentences: "There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on a ferry going to pick up the people."

The New York Times posted a short news item 15 minutes later. Twitter had spread the news around the world within minutes of the landing.

Breaking the news, spreading it and discussing it all happened at once. That unprecedented speed and the sheer number of people talking became Twitter's strength. Its role in Iran's Green Revolution and the 2011 Arab Spring protests made it into journalism textbooks.

But Twitter never replaced the news organizations, as some had hoped.

A 2010 study of 40 million tweets found that most of the content that spread furthest came from big accounts with huge followings, not so different from the one-to-many model of traditional media.

And the most retweeted content was mostly news reports and links to articles from news organizations. In the end, Twitter became a distribution channel for the news.

For a while Twitter changed how brands advertise, but it didn't last

On Twitter, time is the only thing that orders information, so a well-timed post can go viral. Take this Oreo ad:

It was during the Super Bowl in 2011. The stadium suddenly lost power and went dark. While everyone was griping about it on Twitter, Oreo posted this ad: "You can still dunk in the dark." ("Dunk" is a pun: a slam dunk, or dipping a cookie in milk.)

The ad cost almost nothing: a plain photo of an Oreo and one line of copy. But because everyone happened to be on Twitter at that moment, it looked brilliant and spread within minutes.

It became the textbook case of brand marketing on Twitter, and viral marketing became what every brand wanted.

On Sina Weibo, the agency Huanshi Interactive, which runs the @Durex account, works constantly at exactly this. Whenever there is a news event or a holiday, @Durex posts a few witty lines and images to grab attention.

The good times didn't last. Companies like Facebook no longer order their feeds by time alone, so well-timed marketing stunts have become a harder business. WeChat, a more closed platform, strictly filters ads in order to sell its own ad products.

Today, a brand that wants to go viral still has to pay heavily to advertise on platforms like Sina Weibo and WeChat.

Twitter once made us believe the internet could be completely open

Perhaps more important, Twitter once gave us hope that the internet could be a completely open world.

People used it to live-tweet breakfast, find jobs, show off their cats and organize offline events, and some wanted to use its data on a much larger scale.

From 2009, researchers tried compiling Twitter discussion about brands and companies into analysis that predicted their share prices.

Dell joined Twitter as early as 2007. Besides handling customer service there, it used the platform to track its brand reputation and gauge how its latest marketing was landing.

Even in China it became routine for headhunters to look for candidates on Weibo, and for HR staff to check applicants' Weibo accounts while screening résumés.

Remember Maimai, the app accused a couple of years ago of scraping Weibo data? It wanted to harvest who-follows-whom at scale to work out which workplace gossip concerned you.

For a time, analyzing social-network content was a startup business in its own right.

But today the most successful companies no longer make their data fully public. Facebook's feed is shaped by algorithms, and it won't open its social graph to companies that could threaten it. WeChat opens no data at all.

In China, Sina Weibo, Twitter's imitator, has not found a better answer either. Breaking news has gone to aggregators like Toutiao, and the small daily updates about your friends and family have gone to WeChat Moments.

The services that later overtook Twitter commercially each had clearer goals, executed better, and sold more ads.

But you will never again find a company as open as Twitter: one that truly encouraged hundreds of millions of users to come up with their own ideas, and gave them room to experiment freely.