![]() Twitterrific is a fun little application that lets you both read and publish posts or “tweets” to the Twitter community website. R2183 | craig | 11:44:07 -0800 (Fri, ) | 1 lineĪnd not a moment too soon! We released the first version of Twitterrific just three days later with the following copy on the product website: Added link to Twitterrific web page in config window. Removed auto launch of Twitterrific web page. I quickly updated both the app and the website: It’s rare to have unanimous agreement when naming things in software, but in this case everyone loved the word “tweet”. (In retrospect, this email is also the first hint that we spelled the app’s name wrong!) I don't want its pending release to stall your development or release date, since we will continue to support basic auth for existing clients, but would you be interested in beta-testing the api machinations? Second, I'm in the process of building a real (re: flickr-style) authentication API, so that you'll be able to obtain tokens for users without having to store their usernames and passwords. Two thoughts first, how about changing "twit" to "tweet" - the "official noun" is "Twitter Update", but that's boring.? First off, great work - I love it, and I think so does everyone else in the office! :-) I work on Twitter with Jack, and just wanted to ping you re: Twitterific. One of our beta testers was an API engineer named Blaine Cook who sent me the following email: Fortunately, the folks at Twitter were using our app with its snazzy new bird icon. Beta releases were frequent and widely distributed. Work was proceeding at a very fast pace during the first week of January 2007. Prior to that point in time, Twitter’s only identity was a logotype. We didn’t know it at the time, but this is also the moment when a bird became synonymous with Twitter. Less than 24 hours later, David Lanham sent me something much better. Updated preferences panel (with quit and about info.) Tweaked on window size. R215 | craig | 13:46:11 -0800 (Wed, ) | 1 lineĪdded a temporary application icon. I always check in something crappy as an inspiration for the talented folks I work with: On the 3rd of January, I checked in a temporary application icon. Also, the “Dan” is Dan Benjamin-in those early days we hadn’t figured out screen names, and as far as I knew, there was only one Dan on Twitter!) ![]() (Thanks to Jordan Kay at Twitter for digging that tweet up. Using the term in January 2007 felt just as awkward as it does my wife was using the Mac when your twit popped up, followed by “there’s a guy named Dan who’s looking for love”. So we started calling them “twits” more as a placeholder than anything. And as someone who loves language, using a phrase like “Refresh Twitterings” made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Menu items with labels like “Post a Twitter Update” were both wordy and boring. R174 | craig | 17:54:11 -0800 (Wed, ) | 1 lineĪs I started to implement the user interface, it was clear that nouns and verbs were needed. So I dried off and started prototyping: the next day I had the world’s first Twitter client running on my Mac.Ī few days later, I checked all my code into our repository and Twitterrific was born: While taking a shower in the middle of December, an idea struck me: it wouldn’t be hard to hook up Twitter’s new API to the Cocoa networking classes and display a table with tweets. Like John Gruber and my colleagues at the Iconfactory, I loved our new “water cooler for the Internet.” I was, however, unhappy with using Twitter via the website or Dashboard widgets. I started started using Twitter at the beginning of December. We thought the best way to react to all this positive activity would be to keep on making improvements. Last month, the number of Twitter users doubled and it looks like it's going to double again before we run out of December. Things are really heating up at Twitter headquarters these days. Subject: Twitter Now Supports AIM and More ![]() The December 2006 newsletter is a great example of the lingo that was in use back then: ![]() In the early days of Twitter, the service used “twittering” as a verb and “twitter-ers” as a noun. It’s not everyday that a word you helped create gets added to this prestigious publication, so I thought I’d share a bit of the early history of the word “tweet.” This breaks at least one OED rule, namely that a new word needs to be current for ten years before consideration for inclusion. The noun and verb tweet (in the social-networking sense) has just been added to the OED. Last week, one of my colleagues informed me that the word “tweet” was now included in the Oxford English Dictionary (see “Quiet announcement” at the end of the page.)
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