On this day in 2006, Jack Dorsey wrote “just setting up my twttr”. That was the first tweet ever in what has become a huge global communications platform. There are many ways to try to understand and evaluate what’s happened in the last five years as millions of users have sent billions of tweets. But I choose two: the role of Twitter in the series of protests in the Middle East where information can be sent instantly but not always reliably. And the fact that just last night, as the dawn of the 5th anniversary was nigh, the “fail whale” showed up again as Twitter once more was unable to handle its own popularity. It’s still an emerging platform. One wonders where it will be five years from now.
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