How MySpace Invented Twitter
Tuesday, Jul 14, 2009, 10:00 pm | In General, Ponder ThisTwitter has been getting quite a bit of press lately. It's being heralded as one of the coolest, newest, hippest ways for people to communicate and keep track of their friend's lives and activities. But where did this idea come from? Did the guys who started that "pet project" at ODEO just wake up one day and say "Great Scott! I've got it!" and go to work creating Twitter?
Well yes actually, but I think its important to note that the idea has been around on the 'net for quite some time, and it's first incarnation just might surprise you...
Way back in the early days of social networking, during the Friendster and Orkut's first years, sending messages to people on the internet was widely considered to be frivolous. Email and Instant Messaging (ICQ anyone?) were our primary forms of communication, and most social networking sites simply provided ways to list your email and and IM screen name so members could get in touch with you. It wasn't until about 2001 or 2002 that developers started building full featured private messaging systems into some of the web's most popular sites. Friendster got the treatment as did Ebay. However, something was about to come along and change everything.
When MySpace launched their "Bulletins" feature way back in 2003, the world got their first taste of pointless, one-to-many, broadcast style messages that could be sent out to all of their friends at once. We were familiar with away messages, we'd been using them inside instant messaging clients for years. We were also familiar with the ever-so-annoying "Forward to my entire address book" functionality of email (Which, consequently, allowed lolcats to takeover the internet). But now, we had this amazing fusing of the two ideas. A user could click a button, type in some text or html code into a form and blast that message out to everyone they were "friends" with on MySpace.
The concept took off in a big way, becoming the site's most-used feature. Users were posting bulletins about everything from homework procrastination to concert fliers to haircut previews. MySpace then took bulletins a step further giving them a place on the homepage. Now, every time you logged in you'd see your friends' most recent bulletin posts in a list right there in the sidebar of your MySpace homepage. Any of this starting to sound familiar?
We now have a list of messages, from only the people you're friends with, displayed for you to constantly hit refresh on, right there on your homepage. It would take 3 more years for Twitter to come along. Their innovation on the concept? Limiting the messages to plain-text and 140 characters in length. They also hooked up the concept to an SMS interface, allowing users to "text" in their messages. This allowed for users to be always in touch with their friends, no matter what type of phone they had or where they were in the world.
There's no question that Twitter has changed the face of social media forever. MySpace and Facebook have both made these status-update style messages a core part of their offerings. However, next time you reach for that "Tweet" button, take a second to remember where the idea came from, and whether or not it’s a smart idea twitpic that new haircut you just got.
You could say this is one of the first, but to be honest I still think of it as Blogs and micro blogs. Blogs were the first twitter, they were just bigger and longer. People don’t blog like they used to because of twitter and people are even replacing the traditional RSS method of reading blogs themselves by following blog authors…
I agree this is somewhat related, but think that the bulletin board just wasn’t that popular. If half your friends were bands you were spammed with “GET OUR NEW SINGLE”, etc. Even in your own example you’re spammed by BLONDE about some birthday parties…
Comment by Vrikis — July 15th, 2009 at 4:13 am #
Interesting read, for sure.
It’s one way to look at it for sure, and I can see the resemblances.
Comment by Corey — July 15th, 2009 at 11:26 am #