Time.news – Short messages but a long and turbulent story, which reached a sensational turning point. With the acquisition by the richest man in the world and the most famous troller in the world, Elon Musk, Twitter officially enters a new dimension where “freedom of speech without borders”, “more aggressive algorithms” and more messages will “reign”. politically incorrect. That is anything Jack Dorsey had stayed away from when he got his inspirationwhile enjoying a Mexican tacos sitting on a swing in the park.
It was 2006. Dorsey imagined a network that would allow one person to communicate to a small number of people and to do so with short texts. The first name of the project was ‘twttr’, which seemed to be taken from an alien language, actually copied from Flickr, a system that allowed the easy sending of text messages in the USA.
The developers chose the number “10958” as a short code for sending messages, then replaced by “40404”, until Dorsey came across a dictionary word, “Twitter”, which indicated a “brief flurry of irrelevant information” and a “chirping of birds”.
Square and presidents
The product that Dorsey had thought of was exactly this: a “digital square” in which to exchange short and useless messages. But in the sixteen years of success, Twitter has become anything but: albeit with a much smaller following than Facebook or Instagram – just over two hundred million users, 65 million messages a day – the twitter social network has become the elite platform, the one preferred by political leaders around the world, and ground on which Donald Trump and Joe Biden clashed, to the point that immediately after the announcement of the acquisition by Elon Musk, the former said “Musk is a good guy, but I will go to Truth”, the his personal social network has not yet taken off in full. While the president of the United States, according to the White House, is “worried about the power of social media”. That is, the last two presidents at the helm of the most powerful country in the world felt the need to immediately comment on events.
The uniqueness of Twitter
Twitter, in all these years, has always maintained a more intellectual aura than Facebook, also due to the brevity of the messages, limited to 140 characters, then enlarged to 180, but always limited, compared to other platforms. By 2009, Twitter had earned the front page of Time, taken as an example as a virtuous model of innovation. The following year, January 22, 2010, was that of the first tweet sent to space: the author was NASA astronaut Timothy Creamer, from the International Space Station. Since that time, other astronauts had sent messages and suggestive photos taken from space.
The service has also become increasingly popular on Earth, not only for the ease of reaching a large audience, but for the fact that the natural selection of users has created a sort of ‘community of the chosen ones’, on average of good culture and deep feelings. , where the most common words were “solidarity”, “rights”, “books”, “social”.
Everyone then made the most varied use of it. The Japanese Takahiro Shiraishi, for example, went down in history as the ‘Twitter killer’: through private messages he managed to attract nine people, then killed and torn to pieces.
In our country, the platform has been the basis for many clashes, one of the most recent being the one that saw Fedez’s complaint against Rai. Everyone is on Twitter: the wishes of the Quirinale, the messages of Pope Francis, those of Matteo Renzi, Giorgia Meloni, Giuseppe Conte, Enrico Letta and Matteo Salvini. Mario Draghi, on the other hand, no, he keeps his distance from all social networks.
What Trump failed: expelled from Twitter for his messages, the tycoon first insistently asked to be reinserted, then moved on to launch his own social network, “Truth”, which has only the first letter in common with Twitter. The bird platform will not get it back, as long as the former president doesn’t change his mind: if ‘Truth’ doesn’t conquer the market, Trump knows that the doors of Twitter will always be open and he is free to send his messages, this time around. no longer afraid of being sanctioned.
His possible return will become a catchphrase, which results in interactions. Just what Musk wants, for which the new Twitter will have to be an open community, full of “useful” messages, possibly viral, better if politically incorrect.