Happy Birthday Twitter: How UK Newspapers Stumbled Into The Digital Future

So, it’s the 7th birthday of the most important development in human communication since a young Alexander Graham Bell used a piece of string to connect two plastic cups  and pondered “this gives me an idea” [citation needed]. Twitter has come from nowhere, via everyone not on Twitter thinking that everyone on Twitter just uses it so say things like “might go upstairs later”, to its current position as Most Important Thing On The Planet. And that’s just our Twitter account we’re talking about.

As one might expect from what is now the print media’s most ubiquitous online reference point, the anniversary is being covered in just about every newspaper outside of the Anglesey Examiner, but the press wasn’t always so keen to cover Twitter. Join us now, as we delve through the websites of the UK’s national press (apart from the ones with uselessly hateful search functions) so see when each first covered Twitter, and in which context.

In ascending date order, then:

[UPDATE 22 March 2013: A few of the gaps filled in below, with thanks to a couple knowledgeable readers willing to engage in the dark arts of “knowing things” and “doing research”. An extravagantly angled tip of our titfer to both James and Mike Landers for the assistance.]

The Guardian: 27 November 2006

A Comment is free piece on the acceptability of letting the internet know you’re a real-life person, dammit.

Twitter is: “the ultimate in solipsism”.

 

[UPDATE: Reader, gentleman and walking infohub known only to us as ‘James’ writes in to inform us that The Times belong next on the list. Having deftly avoided the Great Paywall of Murdoch by using proper research database Newsbank, James reports that The Times first covered Twitter just a few weeks after the Guardian. Here’s the skinny:

“The honour for the second reference and indeed the first direct article about it goes to The Times, a two line piece in their "The Click" column in Times2... dated Tuesday 12 December 2006:

The site twitter .com, started in March 2006 as a side project of Odeo, an audio website, is based on the concept of friends and strangers answering the question, "What are you doing?" Subscribers areinvited to tell everyone that they are getting ready for work, they have "just bit into a hot chilli"...or whatever.”

Visit our lavishly furnished comments deck for the full comment from James.]

 

Financial Times: 23 March 2007

Not too much to report, given that you need to subscribe in order to read articles, but the FT are pretty quick out of the blocks, with the Tech Hub section running an article on the fledgling service.

Twitter is: “Microblogging for the lazy.”

 

[UPDATE: It’s possible The Telegraph could be amongst the early adopters, though we’re still not sure exactly when. Reader and gentleman Mike Landers informs us (via the comments of this article, we don’t have a network of spies or anything):

“The Telegraph jumped on the bandwagon early. When I spoke to Orlowski (yeah yeah I know) in Spring 2009 he said it was an open competition between a couple of hacks at the Guardian and their Telegraph counterparts to get as many pieces about it as possible.”

Which does makes sense, with the Telegraph being one of the first – if not the very first – UK newspapers to have a renowned online operation. Though the search function on their website is still wincingly awful.]

 

The Independent: 4 April 2007

An article about Twitter, funnily enough.

Twitter is: According to Tom Wetheredge, a ‘net user asked about the microblogging site for the article, “a perfect example of how the internet can keep us too connected."

 

The Sun: 7 September 2007

In what you could describe as either a sober report on those affected by a tragedy, or an early example into snooping into the social network accounts of victims (which would be perhaps a little unfair, no matter how much we dislike The Sun), a reference to students present at the Virginia Tech shootings using the service to express their panic as the attack was taking place.

Twitter is: a website which “which asks contributors to tell it what they are doing”.

 

Daily Mail: 30 April 2008

A piece about how Steve Jobs is evil.

 

Twitter is: A “one-line blog website”.

Later, the first article about Twitter itself appeared on 24 July 2008 (“New SMS site Twitter grows 600% in a year”), and the first time it tried to crowbar it into a manufactured ‘scandal’ was on 19 December 2008 (when Jonathan Ross – on his post-Sachsgate hiatus – used it to ‘brag’ about daring to enjoy himself).

 

 

Daily Mirror: 19 December 2008

Another slice of faux-outrage about that evil, wicked Jonathan Ross boasting about enjoying himself.

Twitter is: a “new messaging website”, despite actually being almost three years old by that point.

 

 

Daily Star: 9 January 2009

Jonathan Ross again. Note the helpful and newsworthy revelation that Ross posts “up to 23 updates a day”. How DID he get time to literally spit in the face of every innocent man, woman and child in the UK with all that going on, eh?

Twitter is: “currently the hottest networking site on the web.”

 

Daily Express: 14 January 2009

The newspaper, who possibly needed to explain what the internet was to its readers as late as 2008, waited until tabloid bête noir SHAMED JONATHAN WOSSY WOSS does a thing on it before mentioning Twitter.

Twitter is: An “online […] blog”. As opposed to all those offline blogs you get. On parchment.

 

Sadly, no results from the Daily Telegraph, Evening Standard or Metro, due to aforesaid search rubbishness, though you’re all welcome to delve through their archives in search of early Twitter mentions. Google site searches by date don’t work for them, by the way, as that includes results for modern-day Twitter mentions embedded in each site’s CSS.

Meanwhile, for the four newspapers who provide useful search functions allowing for a breakdown by year, here are some charts. Everyone likes charts. Wholly non-scientific, what with each of the following including uses of the word ‘Twitter’ in the context of both the website and the noise birds makes, but interesting. Well, slightly interesting. Possibly only if you’re us.

 

 

NEXT UPDATE: The last ever instances of ‘Google Plus’ in UK newspapers. Or not.

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This Bird Has Flown (Alternatives To Tweetdeck Air for Windows)

The history of mankind is peppered with stupidly short-sighted decisions. “What? Supply enough lifeboats for everyone on board? Oh, like that’ll be a good PR move for our unsinkable vessel. GET OUT”, for example. Or, if you’d like a more contemporary example, Twitter have decided to deactivate the version of Tweetdeck that runs via Adobe Air. And by ‘deactivate’, we don’t just mean “stop providing support for it” or “stop making it available for download from their website”, we mean “if you' have it installed on your desktop computer, it’ll magically cease to function at some point during April 2013.

Yep, when faced with the problem that many people are still using the old version of their desktop client rather than the web-based ‘standalone’ version because the new version is a fiddly, unfriendly, nasty chunk of web-based fudge, Twitter have decided to make people get with the times by, well, smashing their favourite toy and telling them to go out and get the new one. They’re SO good at internet!

Yep, instead of updating the ’yellow icon' version of the app to cope with the forthcoming Twitter API update, it’s being left to rot. Which is slightly annoying for all the people who’ve tried other Twitter desktop apps, including the newer ‘blue icon’ version of Tweetdeck, and found them all sorely lacking. As for using Twitter’s actual website to use Twitter… well, some of us prefer to attempt doing a dozen things at once, cheekily ignoring the fact we’re not concentrating properly on any of them.

You see, following in the footsteps of Windows XP, Tweetdeck Yellow (as we’re going to call it from now on) was pretty much a victim of its own success. It was so damn good at what it did, there was no compelling reason to move on to supposed ‘upgrade’ Tweetdeck Vista. Sorry, ‘Tweetdeck Blue’ (we’re not sorry). Somehow, people don’t buy into the whole “Well, it’s worse, but it’s newer” ethos (see also: iTunes 11).

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Yeah, Er, Thanks, But…

Our Twitter feed feels slightly tainted now. This is possibly payback for us trying to display a modicum of understanding for the subjects of BBC Two’s Young, Bright and On The Right when we previewed it in last Saturday’s Guardian Guide :(

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Our Plaintive Wish

Good news, everyone! Bob Mortimer is on Twitter now!

And at times he makes for a rewarding follow, too. Not least some of the moments where he’s engaging in conversations with Mr Brian Butterfield, Peter Serafinowicz’s in-character Twitter account as the hapless businessman from The Peter Serafinowicz Show, and excellently, at least one episode of the forthcoming series of Shooting Stars.

Sadly though, much of it seems to be very avoidable. Which isn’t a problem if you’re a person with a Twitter account who already happens to be a bit of a humourless clod in everyday life, but a pretty big shame if we’re talking about one of the iconic figures of the last 25 years of British comedy.

Even the bits where Bob entertainingly fails to use Twitter correctly can’t really help save it when he goes and buggers up an entertaining comedic rally with something scene-shatteringly crass and unfunny.

So, our plaintive wish is this: please can Twitter have the Bob Mortimer who co-created and co-wrote Big Night Out, The Weekenders and The Smell Of…, as opposed to the one who wrote Tittybangbang?

Thanks.

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Twitter: The Acid Test

So, you could claim that Twitter has achieved quite a lot for a glorified text messaging service. Facilitating dissent over the re-election of a corrupt government in Iran, giving Fox News a black eye over its unwarranted criticism of the NHS, Stephen Fry getting stuck in a lift, Twitter has helped it all. But, can Twitter achieve real change? In short, can we get #GetNewstopiaOnBBC4 to be a trending topic*?



While the programme itself may have ended about a year ago, which may well be considered something of a problem for a semi-topical news-satire comedy, we reckon the campaign still has legs. Polio-stricken legs with untied shoelaces, admittedly, but legs nonetheless. Surely, if a couple of hundred-thousand followers join us on this, we must surely get our way. It's that simple.



Any readers paying proper attention at this point may like to point out the @brokentv Twitter account is being followed by just 300 people, a largish proportion of which are flangebrained spammers, and that we attract between 50 and 150 visitors per day (most of which have Googled "lesbian vampire killers torrent", which we rank highly in, for some utterly unfathomable reason). With those figures in mind, how could our campaign be expected to register on any sort of scale?



Shut up, that's why. And Barack Obama is technically 'following' us, so if he retweets us, it's in the notional bag. Fingers crossed! Until then, here's a clip of Shaun Micallef, being Paul McCartney, performing a special tribute version of "Imagine". This is why the show belongs on BBC Four*, dammit.



(*Or More4. Heck, even Comedy Central Xtra+1 would do.)

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Twitter: The Early Years (1786-2007)

Now, we’re not claiming this is mindblowing investigative journalism. Why, it’s churnalism at best (see how we try and impress you by making it clear that we’ve read Flat Earth News. Did it work? Oh). Here’s a look at what Twitter used to look like, because we’ve had the idea of looking at it through web.archive.org:

(Note: as the moderately perceptive amongst will notice, not all images were captured by Archive.org’s special science nets. It’s enough to give you a good idea of the overall design, though, and you can click to see the bigger versions.)

June 1786: Not many people know this, but the original Twitter was a sheet of parchment kept outside the door of hostelries. On this parchment, passing merchants could leave messages on what they were up to, proving they were of 140 scrawls or less. Of course, soon afterwards the industrial revolution meant people were too busy being bricked up in chimneys by their bosses after turning up three minutes late to their Spinning Jenny, leaving little time to partake in such fripperies.

Not really, of course. That’s just us doing a funny joke. Well, an attempt at one. Here’s the proper look back.

March 2001: Still a several years away from being a glint in the eye of Ian Twitter Jack Dorsey, the domain is under the control of moustache-twirling domain hogs. “Oh no! Will Dorset be able to seize control of the domain name, or will we all end up using a social network called something else?” you might be saying at this point, if you’re the sort of person who wonders if Queen Victoria will survive the werewolf attack when watching Doctor Who.

February 2005: Worst. Logo. Ever. Still some way from being ready, this holding page doesn’t really give the impression of "Impending Global Phenomenon". In case you’re wondering, that email address link points at prm@9252.com, which is similarly unimpressive. Now, Twitter.com (the current company) weren't formed until 2006, so it’s quite possible whoever prm@9252.com is made an absolute fortune out of flogging the domain name. Top tip: email them and ask them for some money.

October 2006: The first chirps of Twitter proper, presumably using messages from beta users. User “Promote” proclaims “Just added Twitter to my MySpace”. Now there’s a sentence future generations will point at and say “Mum, what’s a MySpace?” Not a joke. MySpace will go the way of Boo.com by the end of next year, you’ll see.

The original public timeline from this incarnation of the network is still online, too. It includes gems such as “awake far too early :(“, “Sleep!”, “Just chilling” and “um well yeah i hate jon hes a jerk”. Plus ca change, eh? It’s worth noting that of the “last 200 tweets” (that's Tweets from the whole of then-Twitterdom) on this page, they stretch back around seven full hours. In modern day Twitter there are single users that approach that amount of Tweet output on some working days.

November 2006: It’s looking a lot more familiar now, possibly only one set of working background images from being recognisable as Twitter.

January 2007: There we go. Not sure if “Chris Applegate” is the former star of Married... With Children, or just some bloke called Chris.

March 2007: The site reverts to including Tweets on the front page, but this time recent messages plucked at random, and made available to the global audience. So, now everyone gets to know that @Kasper is “about to take a dump”.

See? There's classy!

December 2007: Archive.org’s Wayback process stops getting on with the Twitter site formatting, causing the trail to go cold, and this update to peter out quite pathetically. So here’s a clip from Ren and Stimpy.

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Frydonia: GLOBAL EDITION

It's just possible our relationship with Twitter is faltering. We stopped checking our Tweets at noon, and can't now be bothered going back and checking *all* the ones we've missed, because we're too knackered from a full day of ducking and diving. On top of that most of our new Follower requests are from spammers, generally cleverly disguised as suspiciously attractive young women with suggestive names ("Wow! HornyXXXGirl is following me! Let's see what she's Tweeting... 'OMG LOL YOU SHOULD TOTALLY LIKE VISIT MY HOT DATING WEBSITE'. Oh.") Note to such spammers: we're only going to block you, don't even bother. And stop ruining everyone's fun, you shits. Any non-evil BrokenTV readers are of course still welcome to join the 140-char maximum party however, because we've arbitrarily decided we love Twitter again, as Charlie Brooker has just started reviewing crisps.

By golly, we're fickle beasts. However, our love of nosing over the related stats will never falter, and we're delighted to notice that Stephen Fry is now the second most popular person in the entire world, after some bloke called Barack Obama. See?

Not pictured: Britney Spears (6th), Jonathan Ross (8th), The New York Times (9th), Wil Wheaton, who once posted our spoof anti-piracy poster on his blog, and we had no idea he was so famous (15th), Phillip Schofield (21st), John Cleese (23rd), BrokenTV (169,826th).

As we have just shown, merely measuring Mr Stephen Fry against other members of the Twitterati just isn't enough. Previously, we measured his popularity against other European nations, but it's time to up the ante. It's Stephen Fry versus The World! Wikipedia has compiled population info (mostly from the UN) for 221 nations - all the way from the Pitcairn Islands to the People's Republic of China. Just where would Frydonia fit in on this list? And who would be it's populatory neighbours? WE SHALL SEE.

Stephen Fry: officially bigger than Guam, not quite as big as Samoa. But with the number of Frydonians now growing at around 40,000 per week, surely that must change soon. Best get breeding, Samoans! Frydonia is currently in 179th place (from a total of 222 countries).

BrokenTV's position on a similar graph? Second from bottom of the entire world. In your face, Pitcairn Islands.

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Hail, Hail Frydonia, Land of the Brave and Free

Yes, it's another post about Twitter, but we promise it's the last one for a OMFG JONATHAN ROSS SENT US A REPLY ABOUT HANDHELD GAMES CONSOLES THE OTHER DAY while. Twitter is really taking off now, as signified by the way National Treasure Stephen Fry (to use his full name) has raced from a having 60,000 followers, all the way up to 100,000 in just a matter of days.

This led to us clambering onto our special statistical train of thought. If National Treasure Stephen Fry actually were a European nation, and his followers citizens of said nation, where would it sit amongst the list of European countries when sorted by population? The nation could be called Frydonia, and at the time of typing this it would contain 102,408 happy subjects. Most of whom would probably be going to the Apple Store tomorrow for his appearance, only it's been snowed off.

Well, we've taken out our digital felt-tips, and constructed a chart, marking off his place in the list. And here it is, taking in just the thirteen lowest-ranked nations. Startling Microsoft Office-based revelation of the day: if you're going to use images as the filling for a data point, you can just paste in the location of an image from the internet, you don't need to save it to your hard drive first. This discovery means our charts are now prettier than ever.

Admittedly, we should have used an Apple Mac to compile all of that data, if we wanted extra authenticity points. Those figures in full:

Malta	402,668
Iceland	304,334
Frydonia	102,408
Jersey	87,186
Isle of Man	77,000
Andorra	67,000
Guernsey	62,101
Faroe Islands	47,000
Liechtenstein	35,000
Monaco	35,000
San Marino	28,000
Gibraltar	28,000
Åland Islands	26,771
Vatican City	821

So, the newly formed nation state of Frydonia has a larger population than eleven European nations (and yes, places like Jersey do count). Iceland and Malta are currently some way away, but as the population of Frydonia grows, surely they will soon be FLOUNDERING in the wake of a population-based TIDAL WAVE from the glorious new land of... we're taking this way too far, aren't we? Still, it's saved in our "C:/Disappointing Statistical Riffs" folder now, so expect future updates on the Fry-o-meter soon.

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This is a different thing, it's spontaneous and it's called (T)wit(ter)

Despite ourselves, we're still obsessed by Twitter. In fact, it's our brand new favourite thing ever that we'll be bored of by the end of next month. You could say that the entire thing is basically a free help desk where famous people can have an army of geeks solve their technological problems (except in the case of Stephen Fry, where it works the other way round, and is why he should be King Of All Europe). You may prefer to say that it's a hugely pointless waste of time which largely involves sending pretend text messages to people you've never met. You might well put up the opinion that Twitter is to Facebook, as Ceefax is to The Internet. Speaking personally, what with our slightly self-destructive habit of welcoming every little distraction from The Stuff That We Really Should Be Getting On With For The Betterment Of Our Future Selves, it's lovely. We can't help but keep a little Grandstand Vidiprinter-style Twitter window in our peripheral vision when on the office PC.

Our highlights so far include:

• What with the strict 160-character limit on messages, it really does make for good exercise at writing concisely. As this blog (and indeed, sentence) will attest, we're perpetually addicted to using dozens of long words when we'd be much better served just typing out three. Having to spend minutes trying to re-edit a message in order to trim it by five characters, while (and this is very important, because we have standards which MUST BE KEPT) not using horrid txt spk or skimping on punctuation, makes for a fun little puzzle.
  
  
• Miscellaneous thoughts plucked from the head of Charlie Brooker, and plonked straight into your Twitter client. In Monday's G2 column, you're only likely to see the best couple at the foot of the page. Twitterers get to see what is practically a live feed of scatological whimsy.
  
  
• Stephen Fry being funny enough to elicit an audible chuckle at the very least three times per day, often much more.
  
  
• The Daily Show's resident expert and They Might Be Giants' deranged millionaire John Hodgman chipping in with occasional reminders why every family in the English-speaking world should own at least two copies of his book 'The Areas of My Expertise' (and probably his 'More Information Than You Require' as well, though we haven't got around to that one yet).
  
  
• Us getting all excited when Russell Brand adds us to his "following" list. It later turns out that this is actually an imposter using a similar username (rustyrocket) to the real Russell Brand (rustyrockets), who has copied over the names of 2000 people from real Brand's 'followers' list. He Would Have Got Away With It If It Weren't For Those Meddling Kids #1: Real Brand posts messages like "[I am] not vegan yet, i eat cheese made from my own milk, however i am farmed inhumanely and shall report myself to the UN at dawn.". Fake Brand posts messages like "I am looking sexy, I need more mirrors in my chamber", which is pretty much getting it all wrong. He Would Have Got Away With It If It Weren't For Those Meddling Kids #2: Russell Brand knows how to spell his own name -
  
  
• 
  
  
• Popjustice and Sweeping The Nation both popping up at various points during the working day to recommend lovely (and not-so-lovely) online pop tunes. Our fave so far: Neil Hannon's brilliant track about cricket. If you liked "Your Woman" by White Town, this should tickle your like-glands too.
  
  
• Peter Serafinowicz replying to us (yes, specifically us), asking about Spotify after we'd suggested it would be a good place to find Philip Glass stuff. It's possible he was being a bit sarcastic in his reply and he'd already been using it for weeks (we're genuinely not sure, it's more likely he wasn't), but in any event someone else nicked the Spotify invite code we'd posted up for him. Tsk, eh?
  
  
• Phil Schofield brilliantly getting all excited about Tweeting live on ITV1, and about lots of other things in general. He even gives Twitterers live updates on how This Morning is going when he's not on camera. "ITV have given me a computer in the studio! I'm on the set now! I'm being encouraged! Gonna tweet during the show!!!!!"
  
  
• Robert Popper putting up lovely links with which to brighten up the day.
  
  
• Graham Linehan posting a live commentary on himself watching the extended version of Tropic Thunder as we're typing these very words.

That's mostly from the last 24 hours, and we haven't even got onto the subject of people contacting us about stuff yet. Look, it's top fun, and everyone should take part in it, just like they should with online FIFA '09 and silhouette pornography.

So: who's the most famous out of everyone in Twitterdom? Probably Barack Obama or Paris Hilton or someone, if you use the obvious and incorrect criteria of the number of followers. The proper way to measure things is to look at the helpful TweetStats site, which looks at the people attracting the most genuine responses. While most of the 'celebrities' using Twitter are doing it for pure PR purposes (and who don't actually know what it is, because their PR department is maintaining it for them), TweetStats looks at people actually using Twitter. Well-known people excellent enough to actually connect with Johnny (and Jemima) Public.

So: who would be top of that pile going by today's stats?

1. An American blogger called iJustine, who seems to be getting paid by Apple or referral links or something. But ignore her for now.
2. Phillip Schofield! That's more like it.
3. S Fry. We think he'd normally be atop this particular pile, but he spent a lot of the day travelling back from Luxembourg.

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Brevity Is The Soul Of (T)wit(ter)

While it might not be immediately obvious from the half-baked meandering that gets posted up here, the BrokenTV gang actually form dozens of searingly insightful and witty opinions about television every single day. Until now, there's been no way to get those opinions from the inside of our skulls to the internet, because we've been busy with the day job, probably in the middle of integrated synergy meetings, in one of the many idea-hub pods to be found in our Centre Of Excellence For Creative Professionals. Oh, alright, dancing for coins in the shopping centre.

But no longer. It's time we started doing more with the latest tentacle of our web 2.0 squid, that thing called Twitter that everyone on telly and radio has been going on about for the last week (for some reason). We've had an account for a while, and despite not really using it we've somehow attracted almost nine followers. Well, we're going to start using it a bit more, so if you're just gasping to know what we think about the BBC-Gaza appeal-gate or the way Radio One's Newsbeat tries to be all 'street' when there's a story about the reclassification of cannabis, you might want to go to our exciting new Twitter page: http://twitter.com/brokentv

We've put Twitteriffic on our iPod Touch and everything.

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