The Twitter Story Part Two

giving a hint of how it was rising prominence. We left off towards the end of two thousand eight's We're picking up in January two thousand nine, which was an interesting story. The first major news story scooped by Twitter. Yeah, photo from the scene of the the US air airplane that had crashed in the Hudson River off of New York City was shared on Twitter before the major news

outlets began covering story at all. Um and that was a scoop by Twitter user Janice Crumbs Jay Crumbs, who sent the tweet um quote photo length, there's a link to the photo and then there's a plane in the Hudson I'm on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy. Yeah. I remember that story too, I mean obviously, uh And and it was dramatic, you know, hearing all about that kind of unfolding on Twitter before anyone could could cover

it again, it really showed the potential power of this service. Absolutely. At the time, the company still only had twenty nine employees, which was an increase of by by twenty one employees from about two years previous, but still it was It

was a small, small endeavor relatively. Yeah, when you sit there and think about how many people were using the service, to think that only twenty nine people were in charge of keeping it going might have also explained a little bit about the frequency of the fail whale, but at any rate. In April two thousand nine, Mike Massimino made the first tweet from outer space. But it wasn't like con I just think of that whenever I think of space now. His message was from orbit launch was awesome.

I am feeling great, working hard and enjoying the magnificent views. The adventure of a lifetime has begun. There were a lot of exclamation marks in that too. To be fair, he was in space. He was in space that I would use exclamation points even more than I already do if I were in space. Yeah, I think I think you would just hear me shouting exuberantly, and there'll probably be some expletives in there, but joyous expletives. Would you

hear you shouting from space? If I'm actually in space, then no, But that's an entirely different podcast where we can talk about why you don't hear in space at any rate. In May of two thousand nine, the billionth tweet was sent um and no, I have no idea what it was, and I'm still guessing it was something about lunch. Lunch. That's a good guess. You know, it's statistically it's likely either lunch or someone complaining about some other social networking service that those those are two safe

bets with Twitter. Um, And as much as I joke about obviously I love Twitter, I wouldn't have made the teen thousands of In early June two thousand nine, Twitter introduced verification. Now, this is another one of those little controversial subjects. The idea was that it was to verify certain high profile Twitter accounts, celebrities basically, yeah, so that

people would know that this is actually that person. It's not someone for the marketing team and not someone to be them, right right, It might be it might technically be someone pretending to be them, but on an official capacity, right, Like it might be someone's handler who is in charge of the Twitter feed and they have to tweet like

three times a day or something. But you know, it was really meant to let people feel more secure that the person they were following was actually who they were following, but it became kind of a weird sort of semi status symbol, the idea big enough to be verified. Yeah, and I mean I've got a lot of friends in the technology space who have verified accounts. You know, I don't and doesn't, so I don't know what is holding you up, Gweitter, We are important. I mean, I'm getting

a little choked up. But you know, I realized that there's nothing that comes along with verification other than the sense that your your life means something and self worth their pride. Right. Obviously we are making light of this, but there there's been some confusion around verification as well, because I know that there have been at least some

accounts that were verified and then through some means, became unverified. Um, they're also cases of companies, like uh, companies actually buddying up to Twitter, and at least this is the this is allegedly I don't know if this is exactly true, but allegedly some companies paying a good amount for Twitter uh promoted tweets, which we'll get to in a little bit um, and then in return they end up getting verified accounts for all the people who work for that company.

Uh so uh. And there's some people who have turned down verification because they were afraid it would hurt their Twitter Street cred. I didn't even know there was such a thing at any rate. To be more serious, in June two thousand nine, Twitter was being used by Iranian

citizens to communicate during anti government protests. It was called the Twitter Revolution, and that would lay the ground for later uses of Twitter in political uh statements and and and anti government statements around the world, probably most notably in two thousand eleven with the rise of the Arab Spring, which was a series of revolutions in the Middle East

and Africa. So Twitter is now being used as a means of communication when other more official lines of communication are inhibited are either down or right or being purposefully blocked right. So I mean again, this this is really showing that Twitter is a powerful tool beyond this kind of you know, superfluous, silly use that. A lot of people said that's all you know, people on Twitter just waste time, But no, it was really being an instrument

of change. Sure absolutely. Um. Dick Costello joined the company as the new CEO. UM He had formerly worked as an exact for Google, like many of our other Twitter founders, although I guess they weren't always exacts, but had previously worked for Google. Um and was. Costello was a co founder and or the CEO of FeedBurner for a while.

Oh yeah, yeah, another popular service at the time. And then also at that time, in two thousand nine, co founder Jack Dorsey co founded another company, a company called Square, And we should probably cover that at some point because

it's something that's really changed small businesses. Yeah. So Square, for those who don't know, it's a credit card processing service and you can use one of those little gadgets that hooks into Yeah, it's like a little swipe dongle that you've ever seen someone with a with a little white, square shaped dongle attached to their phone that swiped their credit card on it. That is what that is. Yeah.

So it is that hardware and the saw toware that works together so that you can process credit card payment. It's really savvy. It's for it's for a relatively small transaction payment. And uh and I think that they send you the dongle for free at this point. Yeah, and it ended up being well, we'll see a decent success Square has Square is certainly done very well. So Jack Dorsey continues to make some pretty big splashes in the

technology world. February tenth, two thousand ten, that's when Twitter usage hit fifty million tweets per day. So according to Twitter employee Kevin Well, the daily increase from two thousand eight to two thousand nine in frequency of tweets was one thousand, four hundred percent, and they said that the service was averaging six hundred tweets per second. Uh. Four hundred and thirty three of those were coming from Errington. Michael Arrington. It's just a joke. Please don't come after me,

Mr Arrington. April that is when Twitter launches promoted eats, but on a very limited basis, right They Promoted tweets are those tweets that companies can pay to push into many different users feeds, even if that user doesn't follow the company's account. Um. And one of the cool things about promoted tweets is that if it's not performing well, if people are not retweeting and interacting with it, then

they'll pull the tweet from the promotion feed. Right. So that way, if you haven't checked your your Twitter feed in a little bit and it's they've already pulled it, you're not going to see that. It's not going to

clutter things up. But if it's something that a lot of people are interacting with, then presumably you could be interested in it and it might end up being something that you you then interact with, the idea being that everyone wins in this situation, right right, Right, it's content that was already on Twitter, that was already going to

be on Twitter. And this was a huge part of the contribution that Costello was making to the company at the time, wherein he was going like, no, there are ways to monetize this, and this was kind of the initial solution for getting some money into this company other than from pure investment funding, right, because you can only do that for so long before investors say, hey, I'd like some of that back. How was this an investment and not a charitable donation, right? And that, I mean,

that was a big question this is we're talking about. Remember, the service was launching around two thousand six, and two thousand seven was when it got big in it south by Southwest. Years have passed and this is the first time we start seeing a real move to monetization. That was a big deal. Oh yeah. They would go on to launch promoted trends and promoted accounts later, right, And they did have some specific rules about promoted tweets. They

companies could only promote their own tweets. So if I am a fan of Lauren's company and I send out a message about how awesome Lauren's company is, she couldn't promote my tweet about her company. And that's mostly in the United States due to the Federal Trade Commission having

a ban on commercial appropriation. And if you're wondering what the difference is between that and Facebook's thing where they can advertise which companies your friends like, like Capital l like on Facebook to you in order to tell you about that company. That's different because they're only saying that this person has expressed an interest. It's not appropriation of actual content, right. They're not taking something that your friend has written and then presenting it to you as an ad.

They're just saying, Hey, your friend likes this, You like your friend, don't you also like this? By the transitive property of like. By the way, that doesn't always work, my friends like some really terrible stuff. I agree entirely. Um And yeah, I mean, you know, this is probably really obvious to many people listening to this who are in in internet industry kind of jobs. But I mean, you know, running a really popular website is not free. It's that you have to You have to keep up

as servers. There's a lot of equipment involved, you have to engineer all of its software. There's electricity bills. I mean, if your servers start to get towards the end of their useful life, you have to replace them. I mean, the real So obviously this was a big, big step for Twitter, and a very important one. Another one of those things, um that also happened in April of the company announced that they would be collaborating to preserve tweets

with the Library of Congress. Um And and that's that's after a six month delay. Tweets are submitted for internal library use, non commercial research, public display by the library, and general preservation. Yeah. That that terrifies me to know that someone can go and do research about all the stupid jokes I've made about various science fiction films, and but I I couched them in the way that sounds

like I'm saying something really important. Not that I've done that, say on this very podcast, like in the last episode twice. But yeah, you know it was. It was kind of a big deal. In the same day. Actually, I'm sure that the two were related. Google announced Google Replay, which is a search function that lets you see what was being publically tweeted about on any given day in history. I mean any given day in history back to the

company's origins in two thousand six. Although that hasn't stopped some some really enterprising people creating some amazing joke Twitter accounts of historical figures as if they had been tweeting Chac tweet is one of my favorite things. That's a good one. There's also some who was it I want

to say it was it was. There was a Twitter feed where it was going through a journal of I think it was John Adams and tweeting the journal entries that he made because he made very short one and they tweeted it in time with in the calendar year as the same as the journal entry, which was really cool. Yeah, that's an amazing that's an amazingly nerdy history project. And then there was like Romeo and Juliet that did the

whole play through tweets. I actually don't want to see what Romeo or Juliet's Twitter feeds would have been, Like, I think I'm too old for that. I total love you. Was that was excepting I am I hope I hope

that it was at least in I am big pentameter. Right. Uh, I want to say, yes, there were a lot of people using Twitter in very creative ways whenever they could, because Twitter was still occasionally experiencing, uh, periods of high usage that interrupted service, like little sporting events that happened the summer, like the World Cup, a little thing called the World Cup. Yeah, this this havoc on Twitter this year. UM tweets per second hit over three thousand when Spain

shot that winning goal. Uh, spoiler alert if you're going back and watching the old World Cup for we were sorry that we ruined it for you are bad. Um. The peak of tweets per second for the whole Cup was was three thousand, two hundred and eighty three per second. Um, It's engineers. Twitter's engineers were basically not leaving work that entire time in order to continually implement emergency expansion features, only to have all their implementations be immediately overwhelmed. Yea.

So they're building out extra capacity and that capacity gets filled as soon as it's available. Yeah. Um. And this was sort of the officially unofficial or unofficially official point at which Twitter got really serious about making that whole fail whale thing obsoletely right, the idea of being to build out so much capacity that, barring any serious electrical problem or some other massive equipment failure, it just was

not going to go down. So August, Twitter also launched fast follow for cell phone users in the United States.

This allows anyone to receive tweets on their phone via SMS, even if they don't have a Twitter account, um, which is a really interesting feature because it shows that Twitter was keyed into the fact that people were using this in um in emergency situations as part of political protests in other areas where you know, it's really difficult to get news out to people and crowd control can be incredibly important, and so so you know, That's fascinating to

me that that Twitter was aware that it was you know that that a they were they were trying to make money. Um, you know, they were going to corporations like McDonald's and whatever, and and soliciting money from for advertising from them, and also working with the Library of Congress and also building out this kind of SMS stuff. You know that they their web client had been live

for a really long time at this point. I think that most people were using Twitter on the web rather than or or on our on apps at this point, rather than via SMS. But they were still supporting features for that original SMS space. It's it's interesting because you know, the original approach was making it SMS centric. Uh. It's just that by the time I got to know it, I was thinking of it more of as a web thing than an SMS mostly because I didn't want to have to pay a whole lot of extra money for

tons of text messages. Here's the thing about the United States, in case some of our our listeners in other places may not be aware of this, but the policy for a lot of the telecommunications companies here is that you pay for text messages, not only that you send out but that you received. So if you don't send a lot of text messages out, but you get a lot because you have a lot of friends who just they love the text uh and and it goes over your limit,

you are the one who pays for that. Actually, they might be paying for it too. You can get some double dipping in this. Even if both of you belong to the same uh, the same provider, you might end up having both people charged for all these texts. And so that was a problem, you know, for people who

want to use Twitter that way. But someday I'm going to do a full episode about some of the crazy differences in the way telecommunications companies operate in various countries, because I know there are some people from other countries when they hear about that and like, wait, I have to pay to if I received too many texts? How do I control that? Apart from threaten people who text me? And I found that that's pretty effective. Well, that's true,

that's true. If you develop a certain type of personality, you can you know, cultivate that kind of behavior around your friends. But um, yeah, so anyway, tangent aside, let's get back to the history. So October, we see another big change in executive management, right Coastalo would transition at that point from CEO to CEO. I'm replacing Evan Williams. He says, he'll be concentrating on product strategy. I don't know really necessarily what that means other than just, you know,

here's some more stuff we want Twitter to do, y'all. Anyway, it wasn't stepping down from that public kind of role. Yeah, yeah, having someone who I mean, Costello obviously, with his his focus on monetizing Twitter had really started to transform the company already, So it was time for that transition to go from let's build the service up to let's really make this a company. And uh, we've got a lot more to say, but before we do, let take a quick break to thank our sponsor. All Right, So now

we're up to March of and Twitter is um busy. Yeah. Twitter users are at this point sending a billion tweets per week. And keep in mind that it's only been two years since the billionth tweet period was sent out, right, so now they're matching that every week. It took it took that many years to get to a billion, and now we're seeing that on a weekly basis. Yeah, the average number of tweets sent per day have nearly tripled

in the past year. And Twitter has got a few more people than twenty eight folks working for it now right about fo Yeah? Yeah, And at that point, Jack Dorsey's title changes to executive chairman. His focus is also on product development. Uh. And according to an article in The New York Times, no one at Twitter directly reports for Dorsey, perhaps lending some credence to those those Um employees who said that he was not the easiest man

to work directly for. So he may still be doing quite influential work at Twitter, but he doesn't have a team reporting to him. Uh. May Twitter acquires tweet Deck, And boy did that get some people riled up, Because here's the other thing that Twitter, you know, we we mentioned in the previous episode. I think that Twitter has is known for taking ideas that people have created on Twitter and then incorporating it directly into the service. Yeah,

that's what tweet Tech was. It was a dashboard app that had been developed starting way back in tight by a London programmer named Ian Dodsworth. So once again we see Twitter saying that's a brilliant idea, let's buy it

and make it part of ours. Another thing is that you know, Twitter has been very uh careful about other services coming out that could take traffic away from Twitter, and but using the Twitter the Twitter service as its foundation, and uh, you know, some people see it as anti competitive, some people see it as being um harmful to developers. Some people just see it as a company that's trying to make the best product it possibly can. There are a lot of different sides to the story, and personally,

for me, it's a case by case basis. There's sometimes where I just think, oh, but I really liked using that thing that now I don't know if it will exist anymore. Um, so it ends up being almost it's it's like a matter of bias. So I won't really weigh in. I will say I use tweet deck a lot. Oh yeah, yeah, I think that's why we both used to keep up with everything. It's incredibly Yeah, if you

have more than one Twitter account that you follow. For example, I have my own personal one, Lauren has her own personal one, and we both also oversee the tech Stuff hs W Twitter account, So if you ever see a tweet from tech Stuff hs W, it's either Lauren or it's yours truly who's making that. We're the ones who handle that. We don't have a handler. We've asked, no one wants, No one wants to handle us, So it's

just us at this point. So yeah, But anyway, tweet deck really lets you use multiple accounts and oversee them and manage them and even post as different ones very easily. Oh sure sure. Um. Also in May, another really famous tweet was tweeted twin Yeah, twittin, I like that. Yeah. This one was helicopter hovering over a Badabad at one

am in parentheses is a rare event closed parentheses. So this one came from a fellow named so I Attar who was not He didn't realize at the moment, but he was actually live tweeting the raid on Osama bin Laden's hideout. Yeah. So this was how the news broke to the public, and then of course later the news was more officially released. But and at first no one was aware that this had any significance to it other than some sort of military exercise happening in that area

of the world. But as the details were starting to come out, people realized, Wow, this guy, this guy was there when it happened, and it was another example of Twitter can be a tool to to report world changing news as it's happening, and it turns everyone who uses Twitter into a reporter, big deal, making it kind of

easier to do that. In June, Twitter struck a deal with Apple to integrate the service into iOS five, which meant that you could you could automatically integrate Twitter into a bunch of of a bunch of apps period, a bunch of native iOS apps, um which camera, the YouTube apps, stuff like that maps, um and. It also gave third party app developers the ability to code out similar properties, just just making it easier to to use the service

to share stuff. I think it's an interesting development, especially in the way that the Twitter has used um and and and specifically considering that it was circa this time a little bit earlier, I mean, especially once tweet deck really picked up that the ability to filter your feed, like filter keywords out of your feed started to be a thing. It's also interesting that we start seeing Twitter being used as a sign in authorization service, kind of

similar to the way Facebook is. I mean, there are a lot of other services that again kind of glom onto Twitter like Cloud is a big one, you know where you signed into Cloud In case you couldn't hear it, Lauren was rolling her eyes. Uh yeah, I I'm with you. I still check my cloud score, but I'm with you. I I have I have very We should we should have you guys done? Did you? Did you in Christie?

I think we talked. We did an episode where we talked about clout and we talked about what it was and uh, you know how what it was intended to do at any rate. Again, it demonstrates that Twitter was becoming really big because other other companies were using Twitter as their way of creating a service that was really compelling and could make it wide spread enough that that was a useful feature. So September two, thou eleven, that's when it are added SMS functionality by allowing users to

tweet a photo via text message. Yeah and this, this again might be one of those things that doesn't sound like a huge deal to lots of people who tune in here and therefore probably have really good access to the internet, but um, but it's a really terrific accessibility tool in terms of you know, not needing to have WiFi or or or a special app. I mean, you could have a feature phone that has a camera on

it and be able to use this. And you know, there's some feature phones out there that don't support any apps. They don't have an OS that can run apps. So if you're able to take a photo of your phone but you don't have any way of having an app on it, this would be a way of sharing that photo. So it's definitely an accessibility feature. Sure. Um. In November of I believe that the most tweeted message in in

history thus far, I don't think that anything's beat it yet. No, as far as I can tell, the most retweeted message of all time came from November two thousand twelve. It came from a certain Barack Obama. Yeah, and it said four more years and was retweeted more than eight hundred thousand times. Um. Yeah, So I mean, as far as I can tell, there's been no message retweeted more as of the recording of the podcast that we're doing right now.

I mean, if if Justin Bieber sends out a one word message that says deported first, I'm going to be amazed because that shouldn't happen. That's not even possible. And second, I could see that getting retweeted a lot, but so far that's the top one. So December two thousand twelve, Pope Benedict the sixteen launched the first papal Twitter feed and twa yeah popes on Twitter Yeah, and Pope Francis continues to use it. So the Catholic Church getting hip

with the uh the social networking. In January, January, to be precise, Twitter would launch a vine six second video app. Yeah. I remember when this first came out. I was like, what six seconds? Who can say anything in six seconds? That's that's like only having a character. To be fair, again, there's nothing I've ever said that's only taken six seconds. So for those of us who are incredibly verbose, it

is hard to imagine a good use for this service. However, that hasn't stopped people from finding really creative ways, like I've seen some amazing vin Yes, you think like when you're when you're limited to six seconds, it's kind of like that whole rule about you know, novels versus short stories. Right when you when you know you have a limit to how much space you have, every moment counts, and if you can get a time just right. You can have phenomenal short stories, you know, and it's weird to

call him a story with only last six seconds. But if it, yeah, I think makes you laugh or makes you scratch your head or something, if it gets a response from you, then that that's pretty impressive at okay.

So this is another serious example, and we actually talked about this in a sister podcast, um the Forward Thinking podcast, because on Forward Thinking we were talking about how on the stock market, more and more computer algorithms are taking up the large majority of trading on the stock market and through through high frequency trading, right yeah, and some of them are even able to react to stuff that

happens in the news. And this is an example of one of the things that happened in the news that was a fake story that made a huge impact. So the fake story was planted by the Syrian Electronic Army, which hacked into a newswire account official account, the APES account Associated Presses, so Big Times and Associated Presses one of those services that other news services rely upon to get breaking news and then they report it further out.

So ap s official Twitter feed sends out a message that says breaking two explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured. Now the story was completely bogus, right, of course, that never happened. But that tweet caused a lot of I mean obviously caused a lot of commotion, including a serious dip in the stock market to because these algorithms saw that and based on that changed their

their trading methods. Yeah, as dramatically as it turned out. Now. Granted, uh, most of the ground that was lost in that that commotion would be gained back over the next day or so over the course of the following day. Yeah. However, it just shows the kind of power that the Twitter has that um, that that even in world money markets, people had begun using this service to trade information. Yeah, pretty phenomenal. Summer of two thousand, that's when we say

goodbye to a dear old friend. Yes, Twitter officially retired the fail whale. Um it didn't really need them so much anymore. Um, they had the capacity thing pretty much worked out at that point. Uh. The the artist Yeing Liu even created a success lockness graphic for the team.

It was kind of a controversial decision, actually, a lot of people kind of missed the fail will and have complained about it having gone away, and Chris Fry in response, the senior VP of Engineering at Twitter, said an interview with Wired in November, and I quote, it had a long history and some of our users feel very connected to it, But in the end, it did represent a time when I don't think we lived up to what

the world needed Twitter to be. Yeah. So, I mean you miss it in the sense that it was kind of a cute little thing. That also was anytime the fail will popped up, it was almost a marker of something socially significant. You knew that something. Yeah, every time I saw it, I was like, is it just a Thursday or is something crazy going right now? That's that's that's fair. Sometimes it wasn't anything socially significant. It was just the Twitter had a hiccup. It was just people

were getting out of work or whatever. But yeah, I love that. I love that the fail will. The image of the image of failure is a whale, a real creature, and the image of success is the luckedest monster, a not old creature. I don't know what that says philosophically, but I love it. Uh. In September two thousand thirteen, a startup called topsy offered a searchable archive of Twitter's entire history, which at that time already consisted of more

than four hundred twenty five billion tweets. So I tried this out. Actually before the podcast, I went to topsy and I started searching my Twitter feed because you know, I'm an egomaniacs. So I did my search. However, um mine didn't go back to the earliest tweets. Actually it was it was pretty far into my tweets. It was maybe a year or two into my tweets. However, that being said, you can go to Twitter. If you go to Twitter and you choose the settings on the web

based uh Twitter. If you go to their actual web page, use the settings on that you can request an archive of all the tweets you have ever sent. They will send it to you in a spreadsheet format to actually send you a link where you can download it in spreadsheet format. And so I was able to do that and look back on my Twitter messages. So, yeah, November seven, big day for Twitter. Yeah. Yeah, they held their um

their I p O, their initial public offering. Yeah, so their initial offering price was twenty six dollars per share when the market actually opened. Because offer price and opening price are not the same thing. The opening price was at forty five dollars and ten cents per share, not not that not bad, although by the end of the first day of trading it was at forty four dollars ninety cents, so not as high as the opening price.

Well that's that's not a bad drop at all. No, and it was still much higher than the offer price of twenty six dollars. So the increase from the offer price was seventy three and it raised about one point eight billion dollars. Now, keep in mind this is a company that was originally started as a five million dollars startup. Yeah, that was kind of taken on as a discard almost. Yeah, so this is where you have all those investors who felt who had back their shares. I can see why

there's some bad blood about the decision. Yeah, there there could be some people who at least feel like I wish I had put up more of a fight and said no, no, let me support this new thing you are doing. I still feel like, like Obvious Corps can't be anything other than a terrific joke. I mean, like like like Williams just trolled all the investors. I mean, I don't know the man, so I'm not gonna I'm not gonna say it one way or the other, but it is a certainly an appealing idea speaking of some

of those initial investors and creators. Yeah, December two thousand thirteen, Jack Dorsey becomes a member of the board of directors for a little company called Disney. You know you have made it when Disney has you on their board of directors. I mean, like Steve Jobs was on that board for a while. I mean, these like some of the top names, and it's odd to think, in a way, it's odd to think of people for the Silicon Valley field becoming members of the board of directors, But Disney's got a

history with that, so yeah, pretty phenomenal stuff. And then getting up to near the present day. We're recording this in early February, and on February six, Twitter shares dropped twenty eight percent in value after the company revealed that it was having trouble increasing the size of its user base and that it didn't grow as quickly as in previous quarters. So they said that they had only a five percent increase in users, and in general, people were

spending less time looking at their Twitter feeds. So that made even though they were profitable, or at least they were making more revenue than before. Uh, they this kind of decrease in um in in Yeah, and and just just the the users experience meant that some shareholders were starting to feel a little uneasy about the little bit. Yeah.

So shares were trading at fifty two dollars and twenty three cents after the drop, so, I mean, it's still higher than what that initial price was earlier back in two but you know, the at the height of Twitter's trading it was much more than that. So we're still kind of watching what's happening here. I mean, obviously, that was one quarter, and things can change quarter to quarters

sometimes sometimes behaviors change in unpredictable ways. And then you know, the most recent quarter has stuff like the Super Bowl, which had a lot of Twitter activity around it. We've got we've also got all of the awards seasons that's gonna i mean singular awards season, but awards shows right exactly exactly. We're gonna have things like all the Oscars and Emmies and stuff like that all get tweeted all

the time. So um and then south by southwest. So you might say that the end of the year, once the year starts winding down, it tends to be quiet anyway, unless something major happens in the news. But then the big getting of the following year tends to get pick up. Yeah, because you start seeing some of those events happened ce

s happening in January. Like, it's just that that I would say the front half of the year tends to be more heavily loaded unless the back half of your year happens to have a few major revolutions that happened throughout the world. Oh certainly. Um, you know, I I don't know. I think that the general social media sphere is going to change a lot over possibly the next year. I mean, you know, it's continually in flux as people

join and and leave social networks. But this is this is an interesting time for these for these two giants, Twitter and Facebook, which really got their starts kind of at the same time and are starting to mature in a way that is kind of a turn up to that that young base of users that are so attractive. Yeah, it's interesting that I I've I've heard although I don't

have any research in front of me. So it may be that I'm I'm remembering this incorrectly, but I remember hearing that the trend was that younger users were trending more toward Twitter and less towards Facebook. That's what I've heard, which is weird because it was just a couple of years ago. It was exactly the opposite. Right, The average age of someone using Twitter was in their thirties, and the average age of someone using Facebook was a little younger.

And now it's starting to shift as young people move toward Twitter and this short messaging service style of communication. I think I think part of the problem with Facebook is that as as that that Facebook group got older, is more adults started saying, Hey, what's this thing all these kids are doing, and then got on it, and then their kids went, oh, my parents are on here.

I don't want to hear anymore. Well. Yeah, when you think about the younger generation that's coming into using social media, they're following the previous generation. So now it just looks like it's a bunch of old people on that. Why do I want to join the old person club? Um? And the reason is we have cookies. Yeah, we make the money so we can buy the cookies. So that's why you want to join Get off my lawn, all right, So that kind of wraps up the Twitter or story

part two. I hope you guys enjoyed this. This look at a company that a lot of us use but maybe not know that much about. UM. Now, if you have any suggestions for future topics of tech stuff, whether it's another company or technology, or just something technology related that you've always wanted to hear us tackle, let us know you send us a message on email. You can send that to tech stuff at Discovery dot com, or

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