| a tweet originally was called a "status", twitter used to be a place where you would publish your instant messenger status. Early adopters used it to unify their multiple messenger platforms statuses into one. If you changed your status on the old messengers e.g. "making a cup of tea" then it had some utility at any rate, a status was a kind of temporary notice, to be replaced by another status at another time. In an IM application you would see your online and offline contacts and see their status underneath their name. People had a few different unconnected IM applications. You could use the API to set your status in twitter and it would be set in AIM (or was it both ways?) You could SMS in a status/tweet from a phone, many people loved that. After that it became a way to record or broadcast other temporary notices, and then to a kind of realtime status. The concepts of a conversation happened then, talking about a topic but without direct refering other people and then with mentions @handle threads on twitter happened afterwards. The twitter tech folks were considering making the metadata around a tweet as more important than the inside content. (e.g. RDF, foaf, geo, links, wikipedia uuids, subject topics, etc etc) And then the masses joined in a few years after with Oprah and it was all about the message. After that the push to VC eternal growth and the algorithm powered feed was what encouraged bad behaviour and a range of un-satisfactory responses to that behaviour which continues to this day. |