He lost three-quarters of the company’s staff through firings, layoffs and voluntary departures, auctioned off furniture and décor, and upended policies on hate speech and misinformation. Musk began his quest erasing Twitter’s corporate culture and image in favor of his own vision as soon as he took over the company in October 2022. It was about connecting with humans and your friends and your loved ones.” “He was one of the four founders who had the emotional intelligence to be able to understand that this was about connecting with humans,” Bilton said. He was going through a divorce and he literally went through the dictionary word by word until he came across the word twitter. Glass, Bilton said, “had been thinking about like heartbeats and emotions. No other social network has a word for posting that’s entered the vernacular like “tweet” - though Google did the same for “googling.” News sites embed tweets in their stories and TV programs scroll them. People who never signed up for Twitter knew what the word meant.įor now, we still tweet, retweet and quote tweet, and sometimes - perhaps not often enough - delete tweets. Former President Donald Trump’s incendiary use of the bird app quickly punted “tweet” into near-constant headlines during his presidency. World leaders, celebrities and athletes, dissidents in repressive regimes, propaganda trolls, sex workers and religious icons, meme queens and actual queens. We’ve been tweeting for well over a decade. But “twittered” doesn’t roll off the tongue and “tweet” soon took over, first in the Twitter office, then San Francisco, then everywhere. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams “went one day and purchased the vowels, two vowels for essentially $7,500 each,” when he bought the URL for from a bird enthusiast, Bilton said.Īt the beginning, people didn’t “tweet” - it was “I’m going to twitter this,” Bilton recalled. It was “twttr” - without vowels, which was the trend in 2006 when the platform launched and SMS texting was wildly popular. You don’t get to decide it,” said Nick Bilton, the author of “Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal” about Twitter’s origins. And it can’t be controlled, it can’t be created, it can’t be morphed. “Language has always come from the people that use it on a day-to-day basis. Upending that takes more than a top-down declaration, even if it is from the owner of Twitter-turned-X, who also happens to be one of the world’s richest men. With “tweets,” Twitter accomplished in just a few years something few companies have done in a lifetime: It became a verb and implanted itself into the lexicon of America and the world. Write a post, you still need to press a blue button that says “tweet” to publish it. SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Elon Musk may want to send “tweet” back to the birds, but the ubiquitous term for posting on the site he now calls X is here to stay - at least for now.įor one, the word is still plastered all over the site formerly known as Twitter.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |