Two lives and two birthdays for Twitter. The social media born 15 years ago on the initiative of a small group of friends remembers March 21 as a real baptism, with Jack Dorsey’s first tweet “just setting up my twttr”, recently “sold” as an heirloom to the sum of $ 2.9 million. But it is July 15, 2006 the day when Twitter is opened to the public, giving users the opportunity to write short messages for those proverbial 140 characters and communicate to the world moods, news, preferences and, why forget them, insults and various invectives. And to cross keywords online, thanks to the hashtag: used for the first time on 23 August 2007, the # sign quickly became a fetish of digital communication, also used by Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and other social networks.
What for years has been called a microblogging platform, with its immediacy and simplicity has attracted personalities from the show business and above all from the news, many ordinary people and obviously politicians, up to Donald Trump, for his excesses definitively banned from social media after years where her posts had sustained attention on Twitter as she tried to change her skin.
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A matter of timing (missed)
Two birthdays for two lives. The first born on the ashes of a failure, as is customary for Californian start-ups (once successful they would have moved to Delaware, a tax haven in the land of USA): the legend tells that Jack Dorsey together with Noha Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams was working on a podcast launch project at Odeo, the company they worked for. A project obviously too ahead of its time and displaced by the launch of the first iPhone and iTunes. From voice to text, the genesis of Twitter proudly launched and then supported (and with a bit of snobbery) the identity of short social, with those 140 indigestible characters for the more talkative boomers, proudly defended instead by those who saw in the brevitas digital a distinctive feature in the new communication. As Facebook conquered the world by expanding and adapting to users’ explicit and potential needs, Twitter has remained true to itself and its 140 characters for many years.
But over time the impermeability to the challenge with other platforms – that of Mark Zuckerberg in the first place – pushed Dorsey and his partners to land on the Stock Exchange, in 2013, a year after the (unfortunate) one of Facebook, even surpassing it by a short-term stock market capitalization.
The second life of Twitter
In September 2017 the taboo of 140 characters falls and experimentation begins at 280 (except for Asian users with non-alphabetic writing). It is the beginning of the revolution from within Twitter, pushed by the pressure on Jack Dorsey of the new partners of the corporation who have long been asking the managers of the company for less originality and more usefulness (similar to what Mark Zuckerberg was grinding, once the steps were archived fakes of the IPO). It was Dorsey himself who launched the Bluesky project in 2019, which aims to transform the platform from a closed system to an open environment; which Birdwatch has recently engaged, which aims to find fake news. It is the expansion phase of the platform that enriches its digital ecosystem to make it more dynamic and rich for users, offering them similar publication methods (reel on Instagram, fleet on Twitter, so to speak), just to keep them.