9781422287231 Twitter®: How Jack Dorsey Changed the Way We Communicate

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Introduc ing Twi t ter

Make Connections: Retweeting One of the ways users can pass along information is by retweeting someone else’s tweet. At first, there was no official way to differen- tiate a unique tweet from a retweet, so users would prefix a repost with the short code: rt. Twitter eventually added in the functionality to differentiate between unique and reposted tweets so that users did not have to mark retweets themselves.

Thanks to Twitter, the whole world is now linked together in one large network. All users have to do is type a short 140 character tweet! “Now I can see the entire world, and how they’re thinking, and how they’re feeling, and what they’re doing, and what they care about, and where they’re going,” Jack Dorsey said in an interview. Twitter became exactly what he hoped it would be. Although Twitter has many possible uses, most users use it as a mi- croblogging service. In other words, they post small snippets about their day on Twitter for their followers to see. They might talk about how they are feeling about an upcoming test, what they are eating at the moment, or what movie they plan to see later on tonight. This is exactly how Jack envisioned the average person would use Twitter when he created Twitter in the first place. Jack was once asked about his proudest moment regarding the inven- tion of Twitter. He said, “I am most proud of how quickly people came to it and used it in a million different ways.” People are finding different ways to use Twitter each day. USERS SHAPE THE FUTURE Twitter users have greatly defined how Twitter is used, but they have also inspired new functionality within the website. For example, users began