With Twitter officially turning five years old this week, the opportunity arose to look back and see how the social media website first presented itself to the Internet world. Like other important communications before it, Twitter’s inaugural words weren’t that memorable.

 

“Just setting up my twttr,” was the first message it published on March 21, 2006, thanks to a message delivered by founder Jack Dorsey inviting co-workers to join.

 

A year before Twitter launched, YouTube came into existence in 2005. Its first words, uttered in a video posted by co-founder Jawed Karim (“Me at the zoo”) were: “Alright, so here we are in front of the elephants.”

 

Going further back in time, the first text message consisted of the words “Merry Christmas” from Neil Papworth, a young engineer at the company Sema, to a friend’s Vodafone in the United Kingdom in December 1992.

 

Ray Tomlinson, believed to have sent the first email in 1971, says that message likely consisted of “QWERTYUIOP” [the last line on a typewriter] or something like it. He can’t really be sure because the email was not preserved.

 

It remains to be seen if “Just setting up my twttr” will find its way into history alongside “What hath God wrought?”, the first telegraph message sent by Samuel Morse on May 24, 1844, and “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you,” Alexander Graham Bell’s first words on a telephone, shouted to his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, on March 10, 1876.

-Noel Brinkerhoff

 

Twitter, Telegram and E-mail: Famous First Lines (by Tom Geoghegan, BBC News Magazine)

Twitter: The Story of the Real ‘First Tweet’ (by Emma Barnett, The Telegraph)