The Origin of Tweet • furbo.org
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The Origin of Tweet
Last week, one of my colleagues informed me that the word "tweet" was now included in the Oxford English Dictionary (see "Quiet announcement" at the end of the page.)
The noun and verb tweet (in the social-networking sense) has just been added to the OED. This breaks at least one OED rule, namely that a new word needs to be current for ten years before consideration for inclusion. But it seems to be catching on.
John Simpson
Chief Editor, Oxford English Dictionary
It’s not everyday that a word you helped create gets added to this prestigious publication, so I thought I’d share a bit of the early history of the word "tweet."
In the early days of Twitter, the service used "twittering" as a verb and "twitter-ers" as a noun. The December 2006 newsletter is a great example of the lingo that was in use back then:
From: "Biz Stone"<br>Date: Wed, 06 Dec 2006 07:51:31 +1100<br>Subject: Twitter Now Supports AIM and More
Hello Twitter-ers!
Things are really heating up at Twitter headquarters these days. Last month, the number of Twitter users doubled and it looks like it's going to double again before we run out of December. We thought the best way to react to all this positive activity would be to keep on making improvements. So come on by and check out http://twitter.com!
That's it for now, Happy Twittering!<br>Biz Stone and The Twitter Team<br>http://twitter.com/biz
I started started using Twitter at the beginning of December. Like John Gruber and my colleagues at the Iconfactory, I loved our new "water cooler for the Internet." I was, however, unhappy with using Twitter via the website or Dashboard widgets.
While taking a shower in the middle of December, an idea struck me: it wouldn’t be hard to hook up Twitter’s new API to the Cocoa networking classes and display a table with tweets. So I dried off and started prototyping: the next day I had the world’s first Twitter client running on my Mac.
A few days later, I checked all my code into our repository and Twitterrific was born:
r174 | craig | 2006-12-20 17:54:11 -0800 (Wed, 20 Dec 2006) | 1 line
Initial import
There was a problem, however.
As I started to implement the user interface, it was clear that nouns and verbs were needed. Menu items with labels like "Post a Twitter Update" were both wordy and boring. And as someone who loves language, using a phrase like "Refresh Twitterings" made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
So we started calling them "twits"; more as a placeholder than anything. Using the term in January 2007 felt just as awkward as it does today:
@Dan: my wife was using the Mac when your twit popped up, followed by "there’s a guy named Dan who’s looking for love". Classic.
(Thanks to Jordan Kay at Twitter for digging that tweet up. Also, the "Dan" is Dan Benjamin—in those early days we hadn’t figured out screen names, and as far as I knew, there was only one Dan on Twitter!)
Luckily, things were about to change. On the 3rd of January, I checked in a temporary application icon. I always check in something crappy as an inspiration for the talented folks I work with:
r215 | craig | 2007-01-03 13:46:11 -0800 (Wed, 03 Jan 2007) | 1 line
Added a temporary application icon. Updated preferences panel (with quit and about info.) Tweaked on window size. Added expanded size to preferences.
Less than 24 hours later, David Lanham sent me something much better.
I couldn’t check it in quickly enough:
r225 | craig | 2007-01-04 13:21:01 -0800 (Thu, 04 Jan 2007) | 2 lines
Added new app icon
We didn’t know it at the time, but this is also the moment when a bird became synonymous with Twitter. Prior to that point in time, Twitter’s only identity was a logotype.
Work was proceeding at a very fast pace during the first week of January 2007. Beta releases were frequent and widely distributed. Fortunately, the folks at Twitter were using our app with its snazzy new bird icon. One of our beta testers was an API engineer named Blaine Cook who sent me the following email:
From: "Blaine Cook"<br>To: "Craig Hockenberry"<br>Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2007 18:29:01 -0800<br>Subject: Twitterific
Hey Craig,
I work on Twitter with Jack, and just wanted to ping you re: Twitterific. First off, great work - I love it, and I think so does everyone else in...