Speaker 1: Get in Touch with Technology was tech Stuff from stuff
Speaker 1: dot Com. Hey everyone, and welcome to tech Stuff. This
Speaker 1: is Jonathan Strickland and I'm Lauren, and it's time for
Speaker 1: us to conclude, at least so far, the story of Twitter.
Speaker 1: We started in the last episode with a description of
Speaker 1: how the company, well really how the products started, and
Speaker 1: then how the company started around it and kind of
Speaker 1: giving a hint of how it was rising prominence. We
Speaker 1: left off towards the end of two thousand eight's We're
Speaker 1: picking up in January two thousand nine, which was an
Speaker 1: interesting story. The first major news story scooped by Twitter. Yeah,
Speaker 1: photo from the scene of the the US air airplane
Speaker 1: that had crashed in the Hudson River off of New
Speaker 1: York City was shared on Twitter before the major news
Speaker 1: outlets began covering story at all. Um and that was
Speaker 1: a scoop by Twitter user Janice Crumbs Jay Crumbs, who
Speaker 1: sent the tweet um quote photo length, there's a link
Speaker 1: to the photo and then there's a plane in the
Speaker 1: Hudson I'm on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I remember that story too, I mean obviously, uh And
Speaker 1: and it was dramatic, you know, hearing all about that
Speaker 1: kind of unfolding on Twitter before anyone could could cover
Speaker 1: it again, it really showed the potential power of this service. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: At the time, the company still only had twenty nine employees,
Speaker 1: which was an increase of by by twenty one employees
Speaker 1: from about two years previous, but still it was It
Speaker 1: was a small, small endeavor relatively. Yeah, when you sit
Speaker 1: there and think about how many people were using the service,
Speaker 1: to think that only twenty nine people were in charge
Speaker 1: of keeping it going might have also explained a little
Speaker 1: bit about the frequency of the fail whale, but at
Speaker 1: any rate. In April two thousand nine, Mike Massimino made
Speaker 1: the first tweet from outer space. But it wasn't like
Speaker 1: con I just think of that whenever I think of
Speaker 1: space now. His message was from orbit launch was awesome.
Speaker 1: I am feeling great, working hard and enjoying the magnificent views.
Speaker 1: The adventure of a lifetime has begun. There were a
Speaker 1: lot of exclamation marks in that too. To be fair,
Speaker 1: he was in space. He was in space that I
Speaker 1: would use exclamation points even more than I already do
Speaker 1: if I were in space. Yeah, I think I think
Speaker 1: you would just hear me shouting exuberantly, and there'll probably
Speaker 1: be some expletives in there, but joyous expletives. Would you
Speaker 1: hear you shouting from space? If I'm actually in space,
Speaker 1: then no, But that's an entirely different podcast where we
Speaker 1: can talk about why you don't hear in space at
Speaker 1: any rate. In May of two thousand nine, the billionth
Speaker 1: tweet was sent um and no, I have no idea
Speaker 1: what it was, and I'm still guessing it was something
Speaker 1: about lunch. Lunch. That's a good guess. You know, it's
Speaker 1: statistically it's likely either lunch or someone complaining about some
Speaker 1: other social networking service that those those are two safe
Speaker 1: bets with Twitter. Um, And as much as I joke
Speaker 1: about obviously I love Twitter, I wouldn't have made the
Speaker 1: teen thousands of In early June two thousand nine, Twitter
Speaker 1: introduced verification. Now, this is another one of those little
Speaker 1: controversial subjects. The idea was that it was to verify
Speaker 1: certain high profile Twitter accounts, celebrities basically, yeah, so that
Speaker 1: people would know that this is actually that person. It's
Speaker 1: not someone for the marketing team and not someone to
Speaker 1: be them, right right, It might be it might technically
Speaker 1: be someone pretending to be them, but on an official capacity, right,
Speaker 1: Like it might be someone's handler who is in charge
Speaker 1: of the Twitter feed and they have to tweet like
Speaker 1: three times a day or something. But you know, it
Speaker 1: was really meant to let people feel more secure that
Speaker 1: the person they were following was actually who they were following,
Speaker 1: but it became kind of a weird sort of semi
Speaker 1: status symbol, the idea big enough to be verified. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I mean I've got a lot of friends in
Speaker 1: the technology space who have verified accounts. You know, I
Speaker 1: don't and doesn't, so I don't know what is holding
Speaker 1: you up, Gweitter, We are important. I mean, I'm getting
Speaker 1: a little choked up. But you know, I realized that
Speaker 1: there's nothing that comes along with verification other than the
Speaker 1: sense that your your life means something and self worth
Speaker 1: their pride. Right. Obviously we are making light of this,
Speaker 1: but there there's been some confusion around verification as well,
Speaker 1: because I know that there have been at least some
Speaker 1: accounts that were verified and then through some means, became unverified. Um,
Speaker 1: they're also cases of companies, like uh, companies actually buddying
Speaker 1: up to Twitter, and at least this is the this
Speaker 1: is allegedly I don't know if this is exactly true,
Speaker 1: but allegedly some companies paying a good amount for Twitter
Speaker 1: uh promoted tweets, which we'll get to in a little
Speaker 1: bit um, and then in return they end up getting
Speaker 1: verified accounts for all the people who work for that company.
Speaker 1: Uh so uh. And there's some people who have turned
Speaker 1: down verification because they were afraid it would hurt their
Speaker 1: Twitter Street cred. I didn't even know there was such
Speaker 1: a thing at any rate. To be more serious, in
Speaker 1: June two thousand nine, Twitter was being used by Iranian
Speaker 1: citizens to communicate during anti government protests. It was called
Speaker 1: the Twitter Revolution, and that would lay the ground for
Speaker 1: later uses of Twitter in political uh statements and and
Speaker 1: and anti government statements around the world, probably most notably
Speaker 1: in two thousand eleven with the rise of the Arab Spring,
Speaker 1: which was a series of revolutions in the Middle East
Speaker 1: and Africa. So Twitter is now being used as a
Speaker 1: means of communication when other more official lines of communication
Speaker 1: are inhibited are either down or right or being purposefully
Speaker 1: blocked right. So I mean again, this this is really
Speaker 1: showing that Twitter is a powerful tool beyond this kind
Speaker 1: of you know, superfluous, silly use that. A lot of
Speaker 1: people said that's all you know, people on Twitter just
Speaker 1: waste time, But no, it was really being an instrument
Speaker 1: of change. Sure absolutely. Um. Dick Costello joined the company
Speaker 1: as the new CEO. UM He had formerly worked as
Speaker 1: an exact for Google, like many of our other Twitter founders,
Speaker 1: although I guess they weren't always exacts, but had previously
Speaker 1: worked for Google. Um and was. Costello was a co
Speaker 1: founder and or the CEO of FeedBurner for a while.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, another popular service at the time. And
Speaker 1: then also at that time, in two thousand nine, co
Speaker 1: founder Jack Dorsey co founded another company, a company called Square,
Speaker 1: And we should probably cover that at some point because
Speaker 1: it's something that's really changed small businesses. Yeah. So Square,
Speaker 1: for those who don't know, it's a credit card processing
Speaker 1: service and you can use one of those little gadgets
Speaker 1: that hooks into Yeah, it's like a little swipe dongle
Speaker 1: that you've ever seen someone with a with a little white,
Speaker 1: square shaped dongle attached to their phone that swiped their
Speaker 1: credit card on it. That is what that is. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So it is that hardware and the saw toware that
Speaker 1: works together so that you can process credit card payment.
Speaker 1: It's really savvy. It's for it's for a relatively small
Speaker 1: transaction payment. And uh and I think that they send
Speaker 1: you the dongle for free at this point. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it ended up being well, we'll see a decent success
Speaker 1: Square has Square is certainly done very well. So Jack
Speaker 1: Dorsey continues to make some pretty big splashes in the
Speaker 1: technology world. February tenth, two thousand ten, that's when Twitter
Speaker 1: usage hit fifty million tweets per day. So according to
Speaker 1: Twitter employee Kevin Well, the daily increase from two thousand
Speaker 1: eight to two thousand nine in frequency of tweets was
Speaker 1: one thousand, four hundred percent, and they said that the
Speaker 1: service was averaging six hundred tweets per second. Uh. Four
Speaker 1: hundred and thirty three of those were coming from Errington.
Speaker 1: Michael Arrington. It's just a joke. Please don't come after me,
Speaker 1: Mr Arrington. April that is when Twitter launches promoted eats,
Speaker 1: but on a very limited basis, right They Promoted tweets
Speaker 1: are those tweets that companies can pay to push into
Speaker 1: many different users feeds, even if that user doesn't follow
Speaker 1: the company's account. Um. And one of the cool things
Speaker 1: about promoted tweets is that if it's not performing well,
Speaker 1: if people are not retweeting and interacting with it, then
Speaker 1: they'll pull the tweet from the promotion feed. Right. So
Speaker 1: that way, if you haven't checked your your Twitter feed
Speaker 1: in a little bit and it's they've already pulled it,
Speaker 1: you're not going to see that. It's not going to
Speaker 1: clutter things up. But if it's something that a lot
Speaker 1: of people are interacting with, then presumably you could be
Speaker 1: interested in it and it might end up being something
Speaker 1: that you you then interact with, the idea being that
Speaker 1: everyone wins in this situation, right right, Right, it's content
Speaker 1: that was already on Twitter, that was already going to
Speaker 1: be on Twitter. And this was a huge part of
Speaker 1: the contribution that Costello was making to the company at
Speaker 1: the time, wherein he was going like, no, there are
Speaker 1: ways to monetize this, and this was kind of the
Speaker 1: initial solution for getting some money into this company other
Speaker 1: than from pure investment funding, right, because you can only
Speaker 1: do that for so long before investors say, hey, I'd
Speaker 1: like some of that back. How was this an investment
Speaker 1: and not a charitable donation, right? And that, I mean,
Speaker 1: that was a big question this is we're talking about. Remember,
Speaker 1: the service was launching around two thousand six, and two
Speaker 1: thousand seven was when it got big in it south
Speaker 1: by Southwest. Years have passed and this is the first
Speaker 1: time we start seeing a real move to monetization. That
Speaker 1: was a big deal. Oh yeah. They would go on
Speaker 1: to launch promoted trends and promoted accounts later, right, And
Speaker 1: they did have some specific rules about promoted tweets. They
Speaker 1: companies could only promote their own tweets. So if I
Speaker 1: am a fan of Lauren's company and I send out
Speaker 1: a message about how awesome Lauren's company is, she couldn't
Speaker 1: promote my tweet about her company. And that's mostly in
Speaker 1: the United States due to the Federal Trade Commission having
Speaker 1: a ban on commercial appropriation. And if you're wondering what
Speaker 1: the difference is between that and Facebook's thing where they
Speaker 1: can advertise which companies your friends like, like Capital l
Speaker 1: like on Facebook to you in order to tell you
Speaker 1: about that company. That's different because they're only saying that
Speaker 1: this person has expressed an interest. It's not appropriation of
Speaker 1: actual content, right. They're not taking something that your friend
Speaker 1: has written and then presenting it to you as an ad.
Speaker 1: They're just saying, Hey, your friend likes this, You like
Speaker 1: your friend, don't you also like this? By the transitive
Speaker 1: property of like. By the way, that doesn't always work,
Speaker 1: my friends like some really terrible stuff. I agree entirely.
Speaker 1: Um And yeah, I mean, you know, this is probably
Speaker 1: really obvious to many people listening to this who are
Speaker 1: in in internet industry kind of jobs. But I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, running a really popular website is not free.
Speaker 1: It's that you have to You have to keep up
Speaker 1: as servers. There's a lot of equipment involved, you have
Speaker 1: to engineer all of its software. There's electricity bills. I mean,
Speaker 1: if your servers start to get towards the end of
Speaker 1: their useful life, you have to replace them. I mean,
Speaker 1: the real So obviously this was a big, big step
Speaker 1: for Twitter, and a very important one. Another one of
Speaker 1: those things, um that also happened in April of the
Speaker 1: company announced that they would be collaborating to preserve tweets
Speaker 1: with the Library of Congress. Um And and that's that's
Speaker 1: after a six month delay. Tweets are submitted for internal
Speaker 1: library use, non commercial research, public display by the library,
Speaker 1: and general preservation. Yeah. That that terrifies me to know
Speaker 1: that someone can go and do research about all the
Speaker 1: stupid jokes I've made about various science fiction films, and
Speaker 1: but I I couched them in the way that sounds
Speaker 1: like I'm saying something really important. Not that I've done that,
Speaker 1: say on this very podcast, like in the last episode twice.
Speaker 1: But yeah, you know it was. It was kind of
Speaker 1: a big deal. In the same day. Actually, I'm sure
Speaker 1: that the two were related. Google announced Google Replay, which
Speaker 1: is a search function that lets you see what was
Speaker 1: being publically tweeted about on any given day in history.
Speaker 1: I mean any given day in history back to the
Speaker 1: company's origins in two thousand six. Although that hasn't stopped
Speaker 1: some some really enterprising people creating some amazing joke Twitter
Speaker 1: accounts of historical figures as if they had been tweeting
Speaker 1: Chac tweet is one of my favorite things. That's a
Speaker 1: good one. There's also some who was it I want
Speaker 1: to say it was it was. There was a Twitter
Speaker 1: feed where it was going through a journal of I
Speaker 1: think it was John Adams and tweeting the journal entries
Speaker 1: that he made because he made very short one and
Speaker 1: they tweeted it in time with in the calendar year
Speaker 1: as the same as the journal entry, which was really cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's an amazing that's an amazingly nerdy history project. And
Speaker 1: then there was like Romeo and Juliet that did the
Speaker 1: whole play through tweets. I actually don't want to see
Speaker 1: what Romeo or Juliet's Twitter feeds would have been, Like,
Speaker 1: I think I'm too old for that. I total love you.
Speaker 1: Was that was excepting I am I hope I hope
Speaker 1: that it was at least in I am big pentameter. Right. Uh,
Speaker 1: I want to say, yes, there were a lot of
Speaker 1: people using Twitter in very creative ways whenever they could,
Speaker 1: because Twitter was still occasionally experiencing, uh, periods of high
Speaker 1: usage that interrupted service, like little sporting events that happened
Speaker 1: the summer, like the World Cup, a little thing called
Speaker 1: the World Cup. Yeah, this this havoc on Twitter this year.
Speaker 1: UM tweets per second hit over three thousand when Spain
Speaker 1: shot that winning goal. Uh, spoiler alert if you're going
Speaker 1: back and watching the old World Cup for we were
Speaker 1: sorry that we ruined it for you are bad. Um.
Speaker 1: The peak of tweets per second for the whole Cup
Speaker 1: was was three thousand, two hundred and eighty three per second. Um,
Speaker 1: It's engineers. Twitter's engineers were basically not leaving work that
Speaker 1: entire time in order to continually implement emergency expansion features,
Speaker 1: only to have all their implementations be immediately overwhelmed. Yea.
Speaker 1: So they're building out extra capacity and that capacity gets
Speaker 1: filled as soon as it's available. Yeah. Um. And this
Speaker 1: was sort of the officially unofficial or unofficially official point
Speaker 1: at which Twitter got really serious about making that whole
Speaker 1: fail whale thing obsoletely right, the idea of being to
Speaker 1: build out so much capacity that, barring any serious electrical
Speaker 1: problem or some other massive equipment failure, it just was
Speaker 1: not going to go down. So August, Twitter also launched
Speaker 1: fast follow for cell phone users in the United States.
Speaker 1: This allows anyone to receive tweets on their phone via SMS,
Speaker 1: even if they don't have a Twitter account, um, which
Speaker 1: is a really interesting feature because it shows that Twitter
Speaker 1: was keyed into the fact that people were using this
Speaker 1: in um in emergency situations as part of political protests
Speaker 1: in other areas where you know, it's really difficult to
Speaker 1: get news out to people and crowd control can be
Speaker 1: incredibly important, and so so you know, That's fascinating to
Speaker 1: me that that Twitter was aware that it was you
Speaker 1: know that that a they were they were trying to
Speaker 1: make money. Um, you know, they were going to corporations
Speaker 1: like McDonald's and whatever, and and soliciting money from for
Speaker 1: advertising from them, and also working with the Library of
Speaker 1: Congress and also building out this kind of SMS stuff.
Speaker 1: You know that they their web client had been live
Speaker 1: for a really long time at this point. I think
Speaker 1: that most people were using Twitter on the web rather
Speaker 1: than or or on our on apps at this point,
Speaker 1: rather than via SMS. But they were still supporting features
Speaker 1: for that original SMS space. It's it's interesting because you know,
Speaker 1: the original approach was making it SMS centric. Uh. It's
Speaker 1: just that by the time I got to know it,
Speaker 1: I was thinking of it more of as a web
Speaker 1: thing than an SMS mostly because I didn't want to
Speaker 1: have to pay a whole lot of extra money for
Speaker 1: tons of text messages. Here's the thing about the United States,
Speaker 1: in case some of our our listeners in other places
Speaker 1: may not be aware of this, but the policy for
Speaker 1: a lot of the telecommunications companies here is that you
Speaker 1: pay for text messages, not only that you send out
Speaker 1: but that you received. So if you don't send a
Speaker 1: lot of text messages out, but you get a lot
Speaker 1: because you have a lot of friends who just they
Speaker 1: love the text uh and and it goes over your limit,
Speaker 1: you are the one who pays for that. Actually, they
Speaker 1: might be paying for it too. You can get some
Speaker 1: double dipping in this. Even if both of you belong
Speaker 1: to the same uh, the same provider, you might end
Speaker 1: up having both people charged for all these texts. And
Speaker 1: so that was a problem, you know, for people who
Speaker 1: want to use Twitter that way. But someday I'm going
Speaker 1: to do a full episode about some of the crazy
Speaker 1: differences in the way telecommunications companies operate in various countries,
Speaker 1: because I know there are some people from other countries
Speaker 1: when they hear about that and like, wait, I have
Speaker 1: to pay to if I received too many texts? How
Speaker 1: do I control that? Apart from threaten people who text me?
Speaker 1: And I found that that's pretty effective. Well, that's true,
Speaker 1: that's true. If you develop a certain type of personality,
Speaker 1: you can you know, cultivate that kind of behavior around
Speaker 1: your friends. But um, yeah, so anyway, tangent aside, let's
Speaker 1: get back to the history. So October, we see another
Speaker 1: big change in executive management, right Coastalo would transition at
Speaker 1: that point from CEO to CEO. I'm replacing Evan Williams.
Speaker 1: He says, he'll be concentrating on product strategy. I don't
Speaker 1: know really necessarily what that means other than just, you know,
Speaker 1: here's some more stuff we want Twitter to do, y'all. Anyway,
Speaker 1: it wasn't stepping down from that public kind of role. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: having someone who I mean, Costello obviously, with his his
Speaker 1: focus on monetizing Twitter had really started to transform the
Speaker 1: company already, So it was time for that transition to
Speaker 1: go from let's build the service up to let's really
Speaker 1: make this a company. And uh, we've got a lot
Speaker 1: more to say, but before we do, let take a
Speaker 1: quick break to thank our sponsor. All Right, So now
Speaker 1: we're up to March of and Twitter is um busy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Twitter users are at this point sending a billion tweets
Speaker 1: per week. And keep in mind that it's only been
Speaker 1: two years since the billionth tweet period was sent out, right,
Speaker 1: so now they're matching that every week. It took it
Speaker 1: took that many years to get to a billion, and
Speaker 1: now we're seeing that on a weekly basis. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: average number of tweets sent per day have nearly tripled
Speaker 1: in the past year. And Twitter has got a few
Speaker 1: more people than twenty eight folks working for it now
Speaker 1: right about fo Yeah? Yeah, And at that point, Jack
Speaker 1: Dorsey's title changes to executive chairman. His focus is also
Speaker 1: on product development. Uh. And according to an article in
Speaker 1: The New York Times, no one at Twitter directly reports
Speaker 1: for Dorsey, perhaps lending some credence to those those Um
Speaker 1: employees who said that he was not the easiest man
Speaker 1: to work directly for. So he may still be doing
Speaker 1: quite influential work at Twitter, but he doesn't have a
Speaker 1: team reporting to him. Uh. May Twitter acquires tweet Deck,
Speaker 1: And boy did that get some people riled up, Because
Speaker 1: here's the other thing that Twitter, you know, we we
Speaker 1: mentioned in the previous episode. I think that Twitter has
Speaker 1: is known for taking ideas that people have created on
Speaker 1: Twitter and then incorporating it directly into the service. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what tweet Tech was. It was a dashboard app
Speaker 1: that had been developed starting way back in tight by
Speaker 1: a London programmer named Ian Dodsworth. So once again we
Speaker 1: see Twitter saying that's a brilliant idea, let's buy it
Speaker 1: and make it part of ours. Another thing is that
Speaker 1: you know, Twitter has been very uh careful about other
Speaker 1: services coming out that could take traffic away from Twitter,
Speaker 1: and but using the Twitter the Twitter service as its foundation,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, some people see it as anti competitive,
Speaker 1: some people see it as being um harmful to developers.
Speaker 1: Some people just see it as a company that's trying
Speaker 1: to make the best product it possibly can. There are
Speaker 1: a lot of different sides to the story, and personally,
Speaker 1: for me, it's a case by case basis. There's sometimes
Speaker 1: where I just think, oh, but I really liked using
Speaker 1: that thing that now I don't know if it will
Speaker 1: exist anymore. Um, so it ends up being almost it's
Speaker 1: it's like a matter of bias. So I won't really
Speaker 1: weigh in. I will say I use tweet deck a lot.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, I think that's why we both used
Speaker 1: to keep up with everything. It's incredibly Yeah, if you
Speaker 1: have more than one Twitter account that you follow. For example,
Speaker 1: I have my own personal one, Lauren has her own
Speaker 1: personal one, and we both also oversee the tech Stuff
Speaker 1: hs W Twitter account, So if you ever see a
Speaker 1: tweet from tech Stuff hs W, it's either Lauren or
Speaker 1: it's yours truly who's making that. We're the ones who
Speaker 1: handle that. We don't have a handler. We've asked, no
Speaker 1: one wants, No one wants to handle us, So it's
Speaker 1: just us at this point. So yeah, But anyway, tweet
Speaker 1: deck really lets you use multiple accounts and oversee them
Speaker 1: and manage them and even post as different ones very easily.
Speaker 1: Oh sure sure. Um. Also in May, another really famous
Speaker 1: tweet was tweeted twin Yeah, twittin, I like that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: This one was helicopter hovering over a Badabad at one
Speaker 1: am in parentheses is a rare event closed parentheses. So
Speaker 1: this one came from a fellow named so I Attar
Speaker 1: who was not He didn't realize at the moment, but
Speaker 1: he was actually live tweeting the raid on Osama bin
Speaker 1: Laden's hideout. Yeah. So this was how the news broke
Speaker 1: to the public, and then of course later the news
Speaker 1: was more officially released. But and at first no one
Speaker 1: was aware that this had any significance to it other
Speaker 1: than some sort of military exercise happening in that area
Speaker 1: of the world. But as the details were starting to
Speaker 1: come out, people realized, Wow, this guy, this guy was
Speaker 1: there when it happened, and it was another example of
Speaker 1: Twitter can be a tool to to report world changing
Speaker 1: news as it's happening, and it turns everyone who uses
Speaker 1: Twitter into a reporter, big deal, making it kind of
Speaker 1: easier to do that. In June, Twitter struck a deal
Speaker 1: with Apple to integrate the service into iOS five, which
Speaker 1: meant that you could you could automatically integrate Twitter into
Speaker 1: a bunch of of a bunch of apps period, a
Speaker 1: bunch of native iOS apps, um which camera, the YouTube apps,
Speaker 1: stuff like that maps, um and. It also gave third
Speaker 1: party app developers the ability to code out similar properties,
Speaker 1: just just making it easier to to use the service
Speaker 1: to share stuff. I think it's an interesting development, especially
Speaker 1: in the way that the Twitter has used um and
Speaker 1: and and specifically considering that it was circa this time
Speaker 1: a little bit earlier, I mean, especially once tweet deck
Speaker 1: really picked up that the ability to filter your feed,
Speaker 1: like filter keywords out of your feed started to be
Speaker 1: a thing. It's also interesting that we start seeing Twitter
Speaker 1: being used as a sign in authorization service, kind of
Speaker 1: similar to the way Facebook is. I mean, there are
Speaker 1: a lot of other services that again kind of glom
Speaker 1: onto Twitter like Cloud is a big one, you know
Speaker 1: where you signed into Cloud In case you couldn't hear it,
Speaker 1: Lauren was rolling her eyes. Uh yeah, I I'm with you.
Speaker 1: I still check my cloud score, but I'm with you.
Speaker 1: I I have I have very We should we should
Speaker 1: have you guys done? Did you? Did you in Christie?
Speaker 1: I think we talked. We did an episode where we
Speaker 1: talked about clout and we talked about what it was
Speaker 1: and uh, you know how what it was intended to
Speaker 1: do at any rate. Again, it demonstrates that Twitter was
Speaker 1: becoming really big because other other companies were using Twitter
Speaker 1: as their way of creating a service that was really
Speaker 1: compelling and could make it wide spread enough that that
Speaker 1: was a useful feature. So September two, thou eleven, that's
Speaker 1: when it are added SMS functionality by allowing users to
Speaker 1: tweet a photo via text message. Yeah and this, this
Speaker 1: again might be one of those things that doesn't sound
Speaker 1: like a huge deal to lots of people who tune
Speaker 1: in here and therefore probably have really good access to
Speaker 1: the internet, but um, but it's a really terrific accessibility
Speaker 1: tool in terms of you know, not needing to have
Speaker 1: WiFi or or or a special app. I mean, you
Speaker 1: could have a feature phone that has a camera on
Speaker 1: it and be able to use this. And you know,
Speaker 1: there's some feature phones out there that don't support any apps.
Speaker 1: They don't have an OS that can run apps. So
Speaker 1: if you're able to take a photo of your phone
Speaker 1: but you don't have any way of having an app
Speaker 1: on it, this would be a way of sharing that photo.
Speaker 1: So it's definitely an accessibility feature. Sure. Um. In November
Speaker 1: of I believe that the most tweeted message in in
Speaker 1: history thus far, I don't think that anything's beat it yet. No,
Speaker 1: as far as I can tell, the most retweeted message
Speaker 1: of all time came from November two thousand twelve. It
Speaker 1: came from a certain Barack Obama. Yeah, and it said
Speaker 1: four more years and was retweeted more than eight hundred
Speaker 1: thousand times. Um. Yeah, So I mean, as far as
Speaker 1: I can tell, there's been no message retweeted more as
Speaker 1: of the recording of the podcast that we're doing right now.
Speaker 1: I mean, if if Justin Bieber sends out a one
Speaker 1: word message that says deported first, I'm going to be
Speaker 1: amazed because that shouldn't happen. That's not even possible. And second,
Speaker 1: I could see that getting retweeted a lot, but so
Speaker 1: far that's the top one. So December two thousand twelve,
Speaker 1: Pope Benedict the sixteen launched the first papal Twitter feed
Speaker 1: and twa yeah popes on Twitter Yeah, and Pope Francis
Speaker 1: continues to use it. So the Catholic Church getting hip
Speaker 1: with the uh the social networking. In January, January, to
Speaker 1: be precise, Twitter would launch a vine six second video app. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I remember when this first came out. I was like,
Speaker 1: what six seconds? Who can say anything in six seconds?
Speaker 1: That's that's like only having a character. To be fair, again,
Speaker 1: there's nothing I've ever said that's only taken six seconds.
Speaker 1: So for those of us who are incredibly verbose, it
Speaker 1: is hard to imagine a good use for this service. However,
Speaker 1: that hasn't stopped people from finding really creative ways, like
Speaker 1: I've seen some amazing vin Yes, you think like when
Speaker 1: you're when you're limited to six seconds, it's kind of
Speaker 1: like that whole rule about you know, novels versus short stories.
Speaker 1: Right when you when you know you have a limit
Speaker 1: to how much space you have, every moment counts, and
Speaker 1: if you can get a time just right. You can
Speaker 1: have phenomenal short stories, you know, and it's weird to
Speaker 1: call him a story with only last six seconds. But
Speaker 1: if it, yeah, I think makes you laugh or makes
Speaker 1: you scratch your head or something, if it gets a
Speaker 1: response from you, then that that's pretty impressive at okay.
Speaker 1: So this is another serious example, and we actually talked
Speaker 1: about this in a sister podcast, um the Forward Thinking podcast,
Speaker 1: because on Forward Thinking we were talking about how on
Speaker 1: the stock market, more and more computer algorithms are taking
Speaker 1: up the large majority of trading on the stock market
Speaker 1: and through through high frequency trading, right yeah, and some
Speaker 1: of them are even able to react to stuff that
Speaker 1: happens in the news. And this is an example of
Speaker 1: one of the things that happened in the news that
Speaker 1: was a fake story that made a huge impact. So
Speaker 1: the fake story was planted by the Syrian Electronic Army,
Speaker 1: which hacked into a newswire account official account, the APES
Speaker 1: account Associated Presses, so Big Times and Associated Presses one
Speaker 1: of those services that other news services rely upon to
Speaker 1: get breaking news and then they report it further out.
Speaker 1: So ap s official Twitter feed sends out a message
Speaker 1: that says breaking two explosions in the White House and
Speaker 1: Barack Obama is injured. Now the story was completely bogus, right,
Speaker 1: of course, that never happened. But that tweet caused a
Speaker 1: lot of I mean obviously caused a lot of commotion,
Speaker 1: including a serious dip in the stock market to because
Speaker 1: these algorithms saw that and based on that changed their
Speaker 1: their trading methods. Yeah, as dramatically as it turned out. Now. Granted, uh,
Speaker 1: most of the ground that was lost in that that
Speaker 1: commotion would be gained back over the next day or
Speaker 1: so over the course of the following day. Yeah. However,
Speaker 1: it just shows the kind of power that the Twitter
Speaker 1: has that um, that that even in world money markets,
Speaker 1: people had begun using this service to trade information. Yeah,
Speaker 1: pretty phenomenal. Summer of two thousand, that's when we say
Speaker 1: goodbye to a dear old friend. Yes, Twitter officially retired
Speaker 1: the fail whale. Um it didn't really need them so
Speaker 1: much anymore. Um, they had the capacity thing pretty much
Speaker 1: worked out at that point. Uh. The the artist Yeing
Speaker 1: Liu even created a success lockness graphic for the team.
Speaker 1: It was kind of a controversial decision, actually, a lot
Speaker 1: of people kind of missed the fail will and have
Speaker 1: complained about it having gone away, and Chris Fry in response,
Speaker 1: the senior VP of Engineering at Twitter, said an interview
Speaker 1: with Wired in November, and I quote, it had a
Speaker 1: long history and some of our users feel very connected
Speaker 1: to it, But in the end, it did represent a
Speaker 1: time when I don't think we lived up to what
Speaker 1: the world needed Twitter to be. Yeah. So, I mean
Speaker 1: you miss it in the sense that it was kind
Speaker 1: of a cute little thing. That also was anytime the
Speaker 1: fail will popped up, it was almost a marker of
Speaker 1: something socially significant. You knew that something. Yeah, every time
Speaker 1: I saw it, I was like, is it just a
Speaker 1: Thursday or is something crazy going right now? That's that's
Speaker 1: that's fair. Sometimes it wasn't anything socially significant. It was
Speaker 1: just the Twitter had a hiccup. It was just people
Speaker 1: were getting out of work or whatever. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: love that. I love that the fail will. The image
Speaker 1: of the image of failure is a whale, a real creature,
Speaker 1: and the image of success is the luckedest monster, a
Speaker 1: not old creature. I don't know what that says philosophically,
Speaker 1: but I love it. Uh. In September two thousand thirteen,
Speaker 1: a startup called topsy offered a searchable archive of Twitter's
Speaker 1: entire history, which at that time already consisted of more
Speaker 1: than four hundred twenty five billion tweets. So I tried
Speaker 1: this out. Actually before the podcast, I went to topsy
Speaker 1: and I started searching my Twitter feed because you know,
Speaker 1: I'm an egomaniacs. So I did my search. However, um
Speaker 1: mine didn't go back to the earliest tweets. Actually it
Speaker 1: was it was pretty far into my tweets. It was
Speaker 1: maybe a year or two into my tweets. However, that
Speaker 1: being said, you can go to Twitter. If you go
Speaker 1: to Twitter and you choose the settings on the web
Speaker 1: based uh Twitter. If you go to their actual web page,
Speaker 1: use the settings on that you can request an archive
Speaker 1: of all the tweets you have ever sent. They will
Speaker 1: send it to you in a spreadsheet format to actually
Speaker 1: send you a link where you can download it in
Speaker 1: spreadsheet format. And so I was able to do that
Speaker 1: and look back on my Twitter messages. So, yeah, November seven,
Speaker 1: big day for Twitter. Yeah. Yeah, they held their um
Speaker 1: their I p O, their initial public offering. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: their initial offering price was twenty six dollars per share
Speaker 1: when the market actually opened. Because offer price and opening
Speaker 1: price are not the same thing. The opening price was
Speaker 1: at forty five dollars and ten cents per share, not
Speaker 1: not that not bad, although by the end of the
Speaker 1: first day of trading it was at forty four dollars
Speaker 1: ninety cents, so not as high as the opening price.
Speaker 1: Well that's that's not a bad drop at all. No,
Speaker 1: and it was still much higher than the offer price
Speaker 1: of twenty six dollars. So the increase from the offer
Speaker 1: price was seventy three and it raised about one point
Speaker 1: eight billion dollars. Now, keep in mind this is a
Speaker 1: company that was originally started as a five million dollars startup. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was kind of taken on as a discard almost. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so this is where you have all those investors who
Speaker 1: felt who had back their shares. I can see why
Speaker 1: there's some bad blood about the decision. Yeah, there there
Speaker 1: could be some people who at least feel like I
Speaker 1: wish I had put up more of a fight and
Speaker 1: said no, no, let me support this new thing you
Speaker 1: are doing. I still feel like, like Obvious Corps can't
Speaker 1: be anything other than a terrific joke. I mean, like
Speaker 1: like like Williams just trolled all the investors. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know the man, so I'm not gonna I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna say it one way or the other, but
Speaker 1: it is a certainly an appealing idea speaking of some
Speaker 1: of those initial investors and creators. Yeah, December two thousand thirteen,
Speaker 1: Jack Dorsey becomes a member of the board of directors
Speaker 1: for a little company called Disney. You know you have
Speaker 1: made it when Disney has you on their board of directors.
Speaker 1: I mean, like Steve Jobs was on that board for
Speaker 1: a while. I mean, these like some of the top names,
Speaker 1: and it's odd to think, in a way, it's odd
Speaker 1: to think of people for the Silicon Valley field becoming
Speaker 1: members of the board of directors, But Disney's got a
Speaker 1: history with that, so yeah, pretty phenomenal stuff. And then
Speaker 1: getting up to near the present day. We're recording this
Speaker 1: in early February, and on February six, Twitter shares dropped
Speaker 1: twenty eight percent in value after the company revealed that
Speaker 1: it was having trouble increasing the size of its user
Speaker 1: base and that it didn't grow as quickly as in
Speaker 1: previous quarters. So they said that they had only a
Speaker 1: five percent increase in users, and in general, people were
Speaker 1: spending less time looking at their Twitter feeds. So that
Speaker 1: made even though they were profitable, or at least they
Speaker 1: were making more revenue than before. Uh, they this kind
Speaker 1: of decrease in um in in Yeah, and and just
Speaker 1: just the the users experience meant that some shareholders were
Speaker 1: starting to feel a little uneasy about the little bit. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So shares were trading at fifty two dollars and twenty
Speaker 1: three cents after the drop, so, I mean, it's still
Speaker 1: higher than what that initial price was earlier back in
Speaker 1: two but you know, the at the height of Twitter's
Speaker 1: trading it was much more than that. So we're still
Speaker 1: kind of watching what's happening here. I mean, obviously, that
Speaker 1: was one quarter, and things can change quarter to quarters
Speaker 1: sometimes sometimes behaviors change in unpredictable ways. And then you know,
Speaker 1: the most recent quarter has stuff like the Super Bowl,
Speaker 1: which had a lot of Twitter activity around it. We've
Speaker 1: got we've also got all of the awards seasons that's
Speaker 1: gonna i mean singular awards season, but awards shows right
Speaker 1: exactly exactly. We're gonna have things like all the Oscars
Speaker 1: and Emmies and stuff like that all get tweeted all
Speaker 1: the time. So um and then south by southwest. So
Speaker 1: you might say that the end of the year, once
Speaker 1: the year starts winding down, it tends to be quiet anyway,
Speaker 1: unless something major happens in the news. But then the
Speaker 1: big getting of the following year tends to get pick up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because you start seeing some of those events happened ce
Speaker 1: s happening in January. Like, it's just that that I
Speaker 1: would say the front half of the year tends to
Speaker 1: be more heavily loaded unless the back half of your
Speaker 1: year happens to have a few major revolutions that happened
Speaker 1: throughout the world. Oh certainly. Um, you know, I I
Speaker 1: don't know. I think that the general social media sphere
Speaker 1: is going to change a lot over possibly the next year.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, it's continually in flux as people
Speaker 1: join and and leave social networks. But this is this
Speaker 1: is an interesting time for these for these two giants,
Speaker 1: Twitter and Facebook, which really got their starts kind of
Speaker 1: at the same time and are starting to mature in
Speaker 1: a way that is kind of a turn up to
Speaker 1: that that young base of users that are so attractive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's interesting that I I've I've heard although I don't
Speaker 1: have any research in front of me. So it may
Speaker 1: be that I'm I'm remembering this incorrectly, but I remember
Speaker 1: hearing that the trend was that younger users were trending
Speaker 1: more toward Twitter and less towards Facebook. That's what I've heard,
Speaker 1: which is weird because it was just a couple of
Speaker 1: years ago. It was exactly the opposite. Right, The average
Speaker 1: age of someone using Twitter was in their thirties, and
Speaker 1: the average age of someone using Facebook was a little younger.
Speaker 1: And now it's starting to shift as young people move
Speaker 1: toward Twitter and this short messaging service style of communication.
Speaker 1: I think I think part of the problem with Facebook
Speaker 1: is that as as that that Facebook group got older,
Speaker 1: is more adults started saying, Hey, what's this thing all
Speaker 1: these kids are doing, and then got on it, and
Speaker 1: then their kids went, oh, my parents are on here.
Speaker 1: I don't want to hear anymore. Well. Yeah, when you
Speaker 1: think about the younger generation that's coming into using social media,
Speaker 1: they're following the previous generation. So now it just looks
Speaker 1: like it's a bunch of old people on that. Why
Speaker 1: do I want to join the old person club? Um?
Speaker 1: And the reason is we have cookies. Yeah, we make
Speaker 1: the money so we can buy the cookies. So that's
Speaker 1: why you want to join Get off my lawn, all right,
Speaker 1: So that kind of wraps up the Twitter or story
Speaker 1: part two. I hope you guys enjoyed this. This look
Speaker 1: at a company that a lot of us use but
Speaker 1: maybe not know that much about. UM. Now, if you
Speaker 1: have any suggestions for future topics of tech stuff, whether
Speaker 1: it's another company or technology, or just something technology related
Speaker 1: that you've always wanted to hear us tackle, let us
Speaker 1: know you send us a message on email. You can
Speaker 1: send that to tech stuff at Discovery dot com, or
Speaker 1: drop us a line on social networks. Were on Tumblr,
Speaker 1: we're on Facebook, and we're on this funny little thing
Speaker 1: called Twitter, and all three of those we used to
Speaker 1: handle text stuff hs W and Lauren and I will
Speaker 1: talk to you again really soon for more on this
Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics. Does it house Stuff works
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