Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

As Twitter Turns Five, Founder Tells of Early Days in Tweets

Development of Twitter began on March 13, 2006, co-founder and Chairman Jack Dorsey wrote in a tweet on Sunday commemorating his creation’s five-year anniversary. Dorsey promised to tweet moments from the early days of Twitter over the course of the next two weeks.

So far, Dorsey’s story shows that the basic functionality of Twitter was quickly established and executed, with the first-ever tweet (by Dorsey: “inviting coworkers”) sent only eight days after development started.

Dorsey posted a series of anecdotes about design and implementation decisions in his first installment, including images, emails and IMs archived on other services like Tumblr and MobileMe.

Dorsey’s experiment in historical replay seems to demonstrate the promise of serialized storytelling on Twitter, this time for non-fiction, with readers invited to relive the creation of the influential service for themselves. And he already has a healthy audience, with 1.6 million followers and ample media attention (guilty as charged).

In addition to assisting Twitter’s leadership and reminiscing about its birth, Dorsey also runs his new company, the payments enabler Square, where he serves as CEO.

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Another gadget you don’t really need. Will not work once you get it home. New model out in 4 weeks. Battery life is too short to be of any use.

— From the fact sheet for a fake product entitled Useless Plasticbox 1.2 (an actual empty plastic box) placed in L.A.-area Best Buy stores by an artist called Plastic Jesus