3 Big Milestones in the Development of Twitter ‘Language’
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Kudos to , which is celebrating some social media pioneers. The site recently published a post that reveals the very first hashtag, @reply and retweet—the holy trinity of Twitter engagement.
The first @reply comes to us from Robert Anderson, who, according to his bio, is now a creative director at payments-app company Square.
@ buzz – you broke your thumb and youre still twittering? that’s some serious devotion
— Robert S Andersen (@rsa)
Even since, the @ has meant that you’re talking to someone or, at the very least, mentioning them in a way that you want them to know you’re talking about them.
The @reply in 2007, about a year after the site launched.
Chris Messina brought us the first hashtag:
how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in [msg]?
— Chris Messina™ (@chrismessina)
Although that tweet was published in August 2007, the New York Times didn’t declare hashtags a trend until much later, in .
It’s noteworthy that the first hashtag was aimed at creating “groups,” where now they’re just used to annoy people who don’t know what a hashtag is or label jokes about the latest news item.
And the first retweet? You can thank Eric Rice for that.
ReTweet: jmalthus Yes! Web2.0 is about social media, and guess what people like to be social about? Themselves. Social Narcissism
— Eric Rice (@ericrice)
Wow. That’s prescient.
#insert RSS here#
Kudos to , which is celebrating some social media pioneers. The site recently published a post that reveals the very first hashtag, @reply and retweet—the holy trinity of Twitter engagement.
The first @reply comes to us from Robert Anderson, who, according to his bio, is now a creative director at payments-app company Square.
@ buzz – you broke your thumb and youre still twittering? that’s some serious devotion
— Robert S Andersen (@rsa)
Even since, the @ has meant that you’re talking to someone or, at the very least, mentioning them in a way that you want them to know you’re talking about them.
The @reply in 2007, about a year after the site launched.
Chris Messina brought us the first hashtag:
how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in [msg]?
— Chris Messina™ (@chrismessina)
Although that tweet was published in August 2007, the New York Times didn’t declare hashtags a trend until much later, in .
It’s noteworthy that the first hashtag was aimed at creating “groups,” where now they’re just used to annoy people who don’t know what a hashtag is or label jokes about the latest news item.
And the first retweet? You can thank Eric Rice for that.
ReTweet: jmalthus Yes! Web2.0 is about social media, and guess what people like to be social about? Themselves. Social Narcissism
— Eric Rice (@ericrice)
Wow. That’s prescient.
#insert RSS here#
