Tweet

The big news in the Twitterverse on October 19, 2009, was the sighting of the pentagigatweet. Sent by an out-of-work dotcom executive named Robin Sloan, the six-character text message, a bit of banter between friends, garnered more attention than the war in Afghanistan or the swine flu pandemic. “Oh lord,” it read. The message was sent at 10:28 a.m. PST. By 3:47 p.m. a CNET news story proclaimed, “Twitter hits 5 billion tweets,” quoting Sloan’s two-word contribution to telecommunications history, and noting that he’d geekily dubbed it the pentagigatweet. The following day newspapers around the world, from the Telegraph in England to Il Messagero in Italy, had picked up the story, yet the most extensive coverage was on Twitter itself, where nearly 30 percent of the estimated 25 million daily messages referenced the benchmark. The numbers were impressive. But more remarkable than the level of popularity achieved in the mere thirty-eight months since the microblogging service launched in 2006 was the degree to which those who used it felt responsible for building it. The megatweeting greeting the pentagigatweet was a sort of collective, networked navel-gazing. In the days following the five billionth text message Twitter was atwitter with self-congratulation. That sense of personal investment, essential to Twitter’s growth, was entirely by design. As Jack Dorsey explained in an interview with the Los Angeles Times about the company he cofounded, “The concept is so simple and so open-ended that people can make of it whatever they wish.” Dorsey based the service on his experience writing dispatch software and his insight that the best way to observe a city in real time was to monitor the dispatches coming from couriers and taxis and ambulances. Twitter was created to put that experience in the hands of ordinary citizens, literally, by asking people to periodically send in text messages by mobile phone answering the question “What are you doing?” All participants would be able to follow the stream of responses. In other words, Twitter was formulated as a sort of relay, utterly dependent on the public for content.