International Journal of Communication 7 (2013), 2105–2127 1932–8036/20130005
Copyright © 2013 (Ignacio Siles). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No
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Inventing Twitter:
An Iterative Approach to New Media Development
IGNACIO SILES1
Northwestern University
This article analyzes the creation of Twitter by developing an iterative approach that
accounts for feedback loops between developers and users, sequences of interaction
between these actors over time, and the various identities that media technologies enact
during these processes. To implement this approach, the article integrates studies of
remediation strategies, analyses of the role of users in shaping technological change,
and scholarship on the multiplicity of technological objects. This approach enables
theorizing about novel processes of new media development characterized by the
interweaving of production and use activities. It also expands the heuristic reach of
established approaches to new media development (namely, work on remediation and
user agency). The theoretical implications of this approach are discussed.
Keywords: agency, appropriation, enactment, intermediation, iteration, materiality,
media change, microblogging, new media, remediation, Twitter, users
The creation of Twitter illustrates contemporary processes of technological development where
production and use activities are constantly and variously interwoven. An increasing number of studies
reveals that production and appropriation dynamics are more interconnected in practice than previously
described in many scholarly accounts (Boczkowski & Siles, in press; Hyysalo, 2010; Williams, Stewart, &
Slack, 2005). By studying the case of Twitter’s invention and early development processes, this article
seeks to contribute to current theorizations of the links between the production and use of media
technologies.
I argue that studying the creation and early development of new media requires considering the
role of both developers and users, how they interact and enact media technologies, and how these
interactions and enactments lead to particular patterns of technological development. To make sense of
1
I thank Ken Alder, Pablo Boczkowski, and danah boyd for their invaluable guidance and suggestions. I
received helpful feedback from Lindsay Fullerton and from participants at the doctoral colloquia organized
by the Media, Technology and Society and the Science in Human Culture programs at Northwestern
University. I also thank the journal editor, Larry Gross, and the anonymous reviewers for their outstanding
suggestions.
Ignacio Siles: isiles@u.northwestern.edu
Date submitted: 2013–01–04
2106 Ignacio Siles International Journal of Communication 7(2013)
these processes, I posit the notion of “iteration.”2
This concept affords three analytic advantages. As an
action, iteration points to sequences of interaction between actors such as developers and users. The
notion of the “feedback loop” described by Hayles (2005) captures these exchanges and how they
materialize into specific technological features. As a process, iteration invites an account of the repetition
of feedback loops. It thus encourages tracing sequences of interaction between developers and users over
time. Finally, as a product, iteration suggests that media technologies can be instantiated or materialized
in many ways. This means not only that media technologies are “constantly in the process of
reformulation” (Balsamo, 2011, p. 35) but also that developers and users can variously enact them.
Together, these three insights further theorize interconnections and crossovers between the identities of
producers and users that can be fundamental for the development of media technologies.
I develop this iterative approach by carefully examining how production and use activities were
interwoven during Twitter’s early development. Drawing on interviews with Twitter’s creators and early
users, Web archiving techniques, and traditional archival research, this article discusses the potential of
this approach for theorizing contemporary patterns of new media development and for expanding the
analytical reach of established theoretical frameworks, which I discuss next.
Theoretical Considerations
To make sense of Twitter’s invention process, this study brings together three bodies of
theoretical work: studies of technological production and design dynamics, particularly remediation
strategies; analyses of the role of users in shaping technological change; and a strand of scholarship in
science and technology studies (STS) that focuses on the multiplicity of technological objects.
Studies of Remediation and Intermediation
To produce and design novel technologies, developers typically draw on previous practices and
artifacts. Bolter and Grusin (1999) theorized this dynamic through the lens of “remediation”—that is, how
a singular medium repurposes, refashions, and rehabilitates the “techniques, forms, and social
significance” of previous media (p. 65). Remediation is “the making of new media forms out of older ones”
(Bolter & Gromala, 2003, p. 80). According to Bolter and Grusin, remediation is enacted through two
mutually dependent cultural logics: immediacy, or the assumption that media can provide a direct way to
experience reality; and hypermediacy, or the fascination with media’s means of representation through
which media produce reality. A new medium can thus remediate another by reproducing the way it
represents content and reality (instantiating the logic of immediacy) or by highlighting their discontinuities
(illustrating the logic of hypermediacy).
Some scholars have argued against the assumption of linear causality that underlies Bolter and
Grusin’s framework. Hayles, for example, prefers the notion of “intermediation,” which she defines as the
process “whereby a first-level emergent pattern is captured in another medium and re-represented with
the primitives of the new medium, which leads to an emergent result captured in turn by yet another
2
This approach is not to be confused with the “iterative design” method (Balsamo, 2011).
International Journal of Communication 7 (2013) Inventing Twitter 2107
medium, and so forth” (Hayles, 2007, p. 100). Hayles suggests that media are interconnected by feedback
loops that express various forms of remediation. The materiality of media technologies is a key in Hayles’
theory of intermediation. Materiality, according to Hayles, “emerges from the dynamic interplay between
the richness of a physically robust world and human intelligence as it crafts this physicality to create
meaning” (Hayles, 2002, p. 33).
Theories on remediation and intermediation make possible an examination of how developers
employ meaning-making strategies that have characterized previous media technologies and mobilize
materiality to enable these strategies. However, research in this tradition has concentrated primarily on
production dynamics and has not significantly theorized how users participate in remediation processes.
To supplement these perspectives, I turn to work on the user–technology interaction.
Interdisciplinary Work on User–Technology Interaction
Scholars from various fields have shown that technological development does not stop when
artifacts are designed and produced, but that users can play an active role in shaping the paths of the
stabilization of media technologies (Fischer, 1992). In STS research, the user–technology interaction has
gained “renewed interest” over the past 15 years (Wajcman & Jones, 2012, p. 676). Oudshoorn and Pinch
(2003) thus speak of a “turn to the users” (p. 4) in STS. In this body of work, users are typically
conceptualized as agentic actors who can establish new pathways of technological development by
attributing new meaning to media technologies, by using them in unexpected ways, and by altering the
material structure of artifacts to enable these new interpretations and uses (Eglash, 2004).
More precisely, Orlikowski (2000) argues that the “structures of technology use are not fixed or
given, but constituted and reconstituted through the everyday, situated practices of particular users using
particular technologies in particular circumstances” (p. 425). She refers to these singular use dynamics as
“technologies-in-practice,” which she defines as “specific structure[s] routinely enacted as we use the
specific machine, technique, appliance, device, or gadget in recurrent ways in our everyday situated
activities” (2000, p. 408). Orlikowski deploys the notion of “enactment” (as opposed to “appropriation”) to
suggest that technologies are “never fully stabilized or ‘complete’” (2000, p. 412). Instead, they are open
to a set of different uses shaped by the specific features of artifacts, the symbolic frames that inform their
interpretation, the role of intermediaries, and the singular contexts in which use activities take place.
STS Analyses of Multiplicity
Like Orlikowski, scholars interested in issues of multiplicity in STS have employed the notion of
enactment to argue that the realities and identities of technological objects are variously performed (Law,
2002, 2008). Researchers in this tradition contend that realities are not constructed—a term that evokes a
sense of finality—but constantly crafted in specific situations. Thus, Law (2008) writes, “[Various] realities
(including objects and subjects) and representations of those realities are being enacted or performed
simultaneously” (p. 635). To better understand how these enactments take place, scholars have focused
on practices. This focus, Mol (2002) maintains, allows identifying the mechanisms through which different
enactments are coordinated (thus producing the sense of a single reality) or distributed. In this view,
2108 Ignacio Siles International Journal of Communication 7(2013)
technological objects seem to be a singular, stable reality only when the variety of enactments and
practices constituting them is bracketed. In contrast, their realities multiply when various enactments are
examined.
This study brings these three theoretical threads together to analyze key processes in the
contemporary development of media technologies. Theories about remediation dynamics invite an
investigation of new media production as a process shaped by the reproduction of certain meaning-making
strategies and the materiality that makes them possible. Work on user agency enables an analysis of how
media technologies also change in response to shifting interactions between users, developers, and
technologies. Research on multiplicity invites recognition of the various identities that a media technology
such as Twitter can have and the practices through which these identities are enacted during both
production and appropriation activities.
To bring these frameworks together, I draw on previous scholarship that has sought to articulate
production and use activities (Boczkowski, 2010; Boczkowski & Siles, in press; Hyysalo, 2010; Ross,
2012; Williams et al., 2005). This body of work has greatly contributed to our understanding of how
development and use practices are related throughout the life cycle of media technologies and has blurred
the distinctions between developers and users as conceptual categories. Millerand and Baker (2010) have
noted that “users and developers are not stable entities; they tend to adopt multiple roles that are
constantly evolving throughout information development system processes” (p. 152). In practice, they
contend, there are “crossovers and emergent roles in-between” these categories (p. 156). The iterative
approach deployed to make sense of the invention of Twitter contributes to this body of work in two main
ways: It enables theorizing about novel processes of new media development that are characterized by
the constant interweaving of production and appropriation activities, and it helps us rethink existing
approaches to new media development—namely, work on remediation and theories on user agency. I
elaborate on these theoretical contributions in the conclusion of the essay.
Research Design
This study combined various research methods: interviews, Web archiving techniques, and
traditional archival research. This research design allowed for combining methods with alternative
strengths and considering diverse sources to triangulate the data (Denzin, 1978).
As part of a larger study of the historical development of Web applications for self-expression, I
conducted 45 interviews with key actors, including some of Twitter’s creators and early users. Following
methods for ethnographic interviewing (Spradley, 1979), I invited interviewees to describe the processes
that led to the production of this software application and to interpret its historical development. I then
asked early users to give an account of their early use practices and how these practices have varied over
time. I conducted most interviews in person, although some were completed by telephone, Skype, or email.
Interviews lasted an average of 58 minutes. I recorded each interview and transcribed it entirely.
In addition, I examined online sources, such as Twitter accounts, news outlets, blogs, and
discussions on forums. I also analyzed Twitter’s early configuration and development by examining
International Journal of Communication 7 (2013) Inventing Twitter 2109
different versions of its Web interface that were available on the Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine.” To
make sense of these data, I employed Web archiving techniques developed primarily by Foot and
Schneider (2010). Once I had identified relevant sources on the Web, I analyzed them in two ways: (1) I
categorized them—that is, I ascertained their main features and types of content; and (2) I annotated
them by producing metadata that could allow for the interpretation of both their core material features
and kinds of content. Finally, I conducted archival research of numerous primary sources, including
newspapers, magazines, and interviews and conference presentations given by Twitter’s developers in
various contexts.
Using grounded theory (Corbin & Strauss, 2008), I examined the data collected through these
methods and developed various categories to account for the main concepts and relationships found in the
data. I situated these categories within the wider context in which the invention of this tool unfolded,
particularly the culture of the Bay Area. As this process unfolded, I developed an interpretive framework
for making sense of Twitter’s invention and early development that accounted for the practices and roles
of both developers and users. Once theoretical saturation had been reached, I returned to the raw data to
verify this framework.
The Invention and Early Development of Twitter
To understand the iterative process through which Twitter was created, I analyzed how
developers conceived this application, how they enacted it in a multiplicity of ways, and how users shaped
this development process through feedback loops and appropriation practices. The discussion is organized
around four processes: the conception, production, launch, and early use of Twitter.
Conceiving Twitter
Twitter first developed as a side project within a small company devoted to building audio Web
applications. Early in 2005, Odeo, a small start-up company cofounded by Noah Glass, developer of the
Audioblogger service, and Evan Williams, cocreator of the Blogger software, worked to build a
subscription-based program that could allow users to find, download, and record audio files through a
directory (a set of practices known as podcasting). Williams decided to invest in this start-up after his
departure from Google in 2004. Odeo provided Williams with an opportunity to pursue novel projects that
seemed more difficult to develop at Google. He brought with him not only funds, contacts, and
collaborators but also an idea to make sense of the Web as a medium of self-expression. Building on his
experience with Blogger, Williams considered blogging, with its associated notion of content creation
through reverse chronological order, as part of “[his] DNA” (from an interview in Moggridge, 2010, p.
274).
Various factors altered plans for developing Odeo’s program. The program did not generate the
level of uptake that investors and producers expected. Moreover, Odeo’s developers recall gradually losing
interest in podcasting as the project unfolded. Programmer Evan Henshaw-Plath, Odeo’s first employee
and lead developer, states that the team lost interest when Odeo’s offices relocated early in 2005 to San
Francisco. “All of a sudden,” he recalls, “no one had to commute, which meant that no one had any
2110 Ignacio Siles International Journal of Communication 7(2013)
abundance of spare time to listen to podcasting. So the interest declined quickly” (personal
communication, August 23, 2011). Perhaps more significantly, in mid-2005, as Odeo worked on its
podcasting program, Apple announced the release of an iTunes version with support for similar functions.
This turn of events forced Odeo to look for alternative projects. The start-up thus began hackathons and
brainstorming sessions, common activities in the Bay Area, as a way to look for new projects (Moggridge,
2010; Sagolla, 2009). Developers divided into small groups to discuss ideas. Based on the most promising
proposals, teams worked to build software prototypes.
Among the proposals discussed were a program for recording and sharing video and a group
voicemail service (Henshaw-Plath, 2011; Sagolla, 2009). An idea for an alternative project came from
Jack Dorsey, one of Odeo’s engineers. Dorsey envisioned a program for users to describe and report their
activities and locations (which he referred to as “statuses”) and share this information with groups of
selected friends. He described how his idea had evolved for various years until he finally presented it at
Odeo:
One night in July of [2000] I had an idea to make a more “live” LiveJournal. Real-time,
up-to-date, from the road. Akin to updating your AIM [AOL Instant Messenger] status
from wherever you are, and sharing it. For the next 5 years, I thought about this
concept and tried to silently introduce it into my various projects. It slipped into my
dispatch work. It slipped into my networks of medical devices. It slipped into an idea for
a frictionless service market. It was everywhere I looked. (Dorsey, 2006b, para. 2)
Like Williams, Dorsey built on his previous work experience to envision new projects. He adopted the
status concept from instant messaging (IM) communications and from the dynamics he had identified
when he was developing Web applications for courier and taxi dispatch services in the early 2000s.
Accordingly, he named this early program Stat.us. Through features such as contact (or “buddy”) lists and
tools to share one’s availability, IM had become a common way of expressing moods and coordinates.
Interested in the popularity of IM, developers such as Dorsey and Williams had reflected on how to extend
the defining dynamics of this technology through new projects. In an interview with the Los Angeles
Times, Dorsey explained,
[The idea] started with a fascination with . . . [entities] roaming about the metropolis,
reporting where [they are] and what work [they have]. . . . But it’s missing the
public. . . . What really brought me to that conclusion was instant messenger. This
aspect where you can just locate your buddy list and at a glance locate what your
friends are up to, or what they say they’re up to. I found the same parallels in dispatch.
(From an interview in Sarno, 2009a, paras. 9–12)
Dorsey’s program thus functioned as a remediation of IM, diary-writing applications, and dispatch
services. Moreover, the software application would incorporate mobile short message services (SMS) and
utilize this technology as a material support. By the mid-2000s, the use of SMS was gaining attention from
operators and commentators in the United States. (The enthusiasm that devices such as the T-Mobile
Sidekick triggered within certain groups of users in the country illustrates this phenomenon.) In this
International Journal of Communication 7 (2013) Inventing Twitter 2111
context, Dorsey thought of SMS as the ideal technology for updating one’s status and extending IM
communication dynamics: It could allow users to exchange text messages sent through mobile phones to
report their locations and activities.
Before settling on a name, developers jokingly referred to the program as FriendStalker
(Henshaw-Plath, 2011; Sagolla, 2009). After consulting the dictionary for inspiration, Noah Glass
suggested a new name for the program: Twitter. According to Dorsey,
We wanted a name that evoked what we did. . . . And we looked at what we were doing
and when you received a tweet over SMS, your phone would buzz. It would jitter. It
would twitch. And those were the early names, Jitter and Twitch. . . . Noah Glass took
the word Twitch, and he went down . . . the Oxford English dictionary at the T-W’s, and
we found the word Twitter. (From an interview in Chow & Colgan, 2011, para. 3, 7)
The name evoked “a short inconsequential burst of information, chirps from birds” (Dorsey, 2011a).
Developers adopted the short name Twttr, a five-letter word that could allow them to use the number
formed by the digits that correspond to those letters on a telephone keypad (that is, 89887) as the code
for reporting statuses through mobile phones.
Dorsey, Glass, Christopher “Biz” Stone (a Web developer who had worked with Evan Williams at
Blogger after Google acquired it), and Florian Weber (a core contributor to the Ruby on Rails framework
and who worked as a contractor for Odeo) began developing Twttr’s prototype, while the rest of the
company continued to work on Odeo’s projects. The team turned to Ruby on Rails to program the
application, because Weber was assigned to work on the project. A two-week deadline was set to finish
the prototype. As a guide for organizing the development of the prototype, Dorsey wrote various potential
scenarios (that he called “stories”), which described Twttr’s virtual users in what he envisioned would be
typical uses of the program. These stories portrayed users adding a new contact into the system
(originally called a “friend”), updating statuses, reading the statuses of other friends (a practice that was
referred to as “following”), inviting new users, and banning others from reading the user’s statuses
(Dorsey, 2011b). Users thus functioned as a representation that guided the conception of particular
technological features. In the days that followed the brainstorming session, the team built a prototype
that implemented Dorsey’s stories and experimented with a SIM (subscriber identity module) card
connected to a laptop. Weber recalls the work involved in this process as follows:
I would do the back-end development [and] all that sort of stuff. Jack [Dorsey] was
mostly doing the front-end development, and then both of us were talking about how we
want[ed] the product to work, what sort of things we thought were important or not. Biz
[Stone] was still working at Odeo as well, so sometimes we had the luck of having him
in there and helping us out with design work or certain product decisions. (F. Weber,
personal communication, October 28, 2011)
In addition to finding the name and the domain name for the application, Glass, the team’s
manager, worked on the initial logo designs and implementing the SMS component. The prototype was
2112 Ignacio Siles International Journal of Communication 7(2013)
presented to the rest of the company on March 21, 2006. At this time, Dorsey (2006a) posted a message
“inviting coworkers.” Only workers at Odeo and close relatives and friends (primarily in the Bay Area)
were given access to the program. This opening of the application to a select group of users had important
implications, as will be explained later. Twitter gained enthusiastic early adopters within Odeo. Evan
Williams recalls, “To get these messages was just fun! It was that human connection, fun, lightweight, the
endorphin rush that drives a lot of the social activities on the Web and everywhere else, and it happened
with this very simple mechanism” (from an interview in Moggridge, 2010, pp. 274–275). In this sense,
Odeo’s developers functioned as both producers and users with privileged access to the program’s code.
Producing Twttr
Over the next weeks, a few programmers worked on scaling the prototype and developing it into
a product for launch. As developers worked on scaling up the project, the range of remediation processes
enacted through Twitter expanded (see Table 1). Building on their own professional experiences,
backgrounds, and appropriation practices as users, developers at Odeo enacted Twitter’s original idea in
different ways. They subsequently built features to materialize these enactments. Bringing together work
on remediation and multiplicity, Twitter’s design and early development processes may be defined as
multilayered intermediation—that is, as the enactment of multiple, coexisting layers of remediation. Startup
innovation dynamics provided the context in which new enactments took place. The developers suggest
that the constant exchange of ideas that characterize start-up ventures was crucial in crystallizing this
application in several ways. According to Henshaw-Plath,
Ideas aren’t the product of a single person. The idea of Twitter came from the
discussions that were happening and the ideas within Odeo. . . . Lots of people [had]
ideas. We [had] lots of discussions about them. And then we built stuff. (Personal
communication, August 23, 2011)
Odeo’s programmers emphasized the notion of simplicity as a principle that guided their work.
Williams, for example, had previously experimented with imposing constraints to achieve simplicity in the
Blogger software. With Twitter, as Biz Stone put it, simplicity became a fundamental design paradigm:
“[Simplicity has] turned into a basic philosophy for everything we do. So we ask, ‘Are we getting too
complicated?’” (from an interview in Glaser, 2007, para. 27). Henshaw-Plath recalls how simplicity
operated as a “background” and a “context” for Twitter’s early design: “[We were] very much interested in
[answering]: ‘What can you strip away? How can you remove the barriers to communication?’” (personal
communication, August 23, 2011). Underlying this notion of simplicity was the view that limitations can
function as a key stimulus for innovation. According to Dorsey, “We’re fond of constraints that inspire
creativity” (from an interview in Glaser, 2007, para. 46).
For some developers at Odeo, the application’s reliance on SMS had precedents in technologies
such as TXTMob, an alert system used by individuals to coordinate protests, particularly during the 2004
Republican National Convention. TXTMob allowed users to share messages with others through SMS
during protests and thus coordinate their actions. For Blaine Cook and Evan Henshaw-Plath, two
developers at Odeo with a background in activism, the use of SMS in protests provided a key model for
International Journal of Communication 7 (2013) Inventing Twitter 2113
the type of uses that could be expected from the new application. For Cook, “We built [Twitter] with things
like protests in mind. . . . [It] was explicitly about how to enable things like protest communications”
(personal communication, October 22, 2011). Henshaw-Plath considered TXTMob “a model to be
copied/learned from” in developing Twitter (Henshaw-Plath, 2008). In retrospect, he envisions activism as
a driving force in Twitter’s design:
We were building and demoing and prototyping activism platforms with SMS systems as
the prototype for Twitter. . . . The whole company has always looked at and embraced
the political uses of it and been very pleased with the fact that it was an active political
platform. (Personal communication, August 23, 2011)
Other layers of remediation resulted from the experiences of developers acting as users. For
example, developers identified some difficulties in utilizing SMS as the application’s main messaging
infrastructure. Because SMS users had to pay for each message sent and received, exchanging these
messages was causing financial concerns. For Blaine Cook, a programmer from Vancouver who had
recently moved to San Francisco and was still using a cell phone from Canada, receiving status updates
via SMS was becoming expensive. Cook thus pushed for building a Web component as a supplement to
the SMS infrastructure that could allow users to consult and manage their statuses online. (As the bills for
using Twitter became higher, Odeo agreed to pay the texting bills of its employees.)
The possibility to follow friends through Twitter, contemplated in Dorsey’s original stories, also
tied the application to the rise of social network sites, a notion that gained traction at the time this tool
was under development (boyd & Ellison, 2007). Thus, Twitter also could be envisioned as a remediation of
this type of sites. This layer of remediation also resulted from previous work done at Odeo. According to
Cook, “The ‘Twitter-as-a-social-network’ [was] pretty explicit; and ‘Odeo-as-a-social-network’ as well. You
could sort of see what people were posting, and you could be friends with people on Odeo as well.
Creating social connections was definitely present from day one” (personal communication, October 22,
2011).
These remediation layers coexisted in Twitter’s early production. For developers, the tool
extended practices such as blogging and diary writing; incorporated media technologies such as IM, the
Web, and SMS; built on tools such as dispatch services, social network sites, and activism applications;
and implemented design principles such as simplicity. Yet developers were also convinced that Twitter
embodied something that could not be reduced to any single layer. In other words, when these layers
were combined, developers argued that Twitter constituted “something new” (Dorsey, from an interview in
Sarno, 2009b) and something that was difficult to describe. In retrospect, Dorsey claimed:
When I think of Twitter, I think of—it’s really hard to define because we’re still coming
up with the vocabulary—but I think it’s defined a new behavior that’s very different than
what we’ve seen before. [A] new medium. (Sarno, 2009b, para. 10)
Cook expressed a similar idea: “[Twitter] isn’t [a] mobile thing. [It] isn’t a Web thing. It’s a
communications medium . . . [and] platform. It’s sort of above all of those things and it’s independent of
2114 Ignacio Siles International Journal of Communication 7(2013)
them” (personal communication, October 22, 2011). Developers recall having multiple conversations
about the best way to characterize Twitter throughout its development process.3
Table 1.
Layers of Remediation Enacted in Twitter’s Creation, Production, Launch, and Early Use.
Remediation Enactment Technology
LiveJournal, IM, dispatch services Twitter as “a more ‘live’
LiveJournal. Real-time, up-todate,
from the road. Akin to
updating your AIM” (Dorsey)
SMS as messaging infrastructure
(“What up?”) Use of 140
characters
Mobile applications for political
activism (TXTMob)
Twitter as “an active political
platform” (Henshaw-Plath)
SMS as messaging infrastructure
WWW Twitter as an app for consulting
and managing statuses online.
Reducing the costs of using SMS
Web interface for managing
Twitter (“Timeline”)
Social network sites Twitter as “creating social
connections” (Cook)
Features to follow other users’
activities and privilege their data
(“Peeps”)
Instant messaging Twitter as an extension of forms
of communication between
programmers and geeks
IM access to Twitter
Blogs, short forms of publishing Twitter as “blogging [without] all
these features [and limiting] the
size of the post” (Williams)
RSS, permalinks, timeline in
reverse chronological order
Web-based applications Twitter as a means for building
new applications on the Web
API
Conversational media Twitter as “a flow of
communications relevant to
users” (Cook)
@username, “in reply to” link,
replies page
Articulating various layers of
remediation: Twitter as a new
medium
Twitter as “a new behavior that’s
very different than what we’ve
seen before. A new medium”
(Dorsey)
Twitter as a singular blend of
features, technologies, and types
of content
3
In one of those conversations, Florian Weber recalls, the term microblogging was considered. Yet, he
argues, the term was abandoned because some developers considered that the notion of micro would not
hold against the term nano in the context of the recent release of the iPod nano.
International Journal of Communication 7 (2013) Inventing Twitter 2115
Launching Twitter
In July 2006, Twttr was publicly launched amid a restructuring process at Odeo.4
The application
allowed early users to update their status and read the statuses of others by SMS or via the Web. The
tool’s early Web interface materialized the various remediation dynamics that shaped its conception and
production processes. Thus, the interface presented three columns for enabling communication in specific
ways. The first column was devoted to displaying updates from users on a public Web page or “timeline,”
enacting Twitter as a Web-based application. The second column, named “What Up?” invited users to
“send updates from your cell phone or from the Web.” Finally, the third column, named “Peeps,” enacted
Twitter as a social network site. It allowed users to “star the friends you really like and get their updates
on your cell.” New “friends” had to be invited and had to sign up by SMS.
Twttr’s launch was surrounded by some puzzlement. In news outlets, commentators often
compared it to applications such as Dodgeball and Jaiku. In an early review, TechCrunch’s Michael
Arrington (2006) praised it by giving it “a thumbs up for innovation and good execution on a simple but
viral idea” (para. 6). Yet he also raised concerns about privacy issues and the fact that Odeo was not a
producer of SMS applications. In interviews for this study, Twitter’s developers described the early
adoption of the tool as “slow,” “flat,” and “without direction.” In their perspective, one of the most
significant challenges of this period was finding an appropriate way to define the application and convey
its singularity. This can be interpreted as an expression of the difficulties involved in articulating Twitter’s
multilayered intermediation through a single, encompassing framework.
By the end of summer 2006, Twttr was renamed Twitter. Exchanging SMS messages in
standardized ways, however, posed several technical challenges. Long status updates could be spread
over multiple SMS messages that arrived in different order. Weber explains:
Initially . . . people could send longer updates [that] would just spread out over
multiple SMSs. That caused all kinds of headaches. In the U.S. [SMS] was still not
reliable so you [would] get the second [message] first, and then the first one. (Personal
communication, October 28, 2011)
In this context, developers adopted a “creative constraint” to define the maximum number of characters
that could be used to share a status. SMS infrastructure worked with a unique 160, seven-bit characters
standard. Because sharing status updates would require including the name of the user who wrote them
4
Several employees at Odeo were laid off in the spring and summer of 2006. In September 2006,
Williams bought Odeo’s shares from investors. He noted that in the shift from Odeo to Twitter, the
company had deviated from the direction and technologies that investors had originally envisioned.
Williams named the new company Obvious LLC. See Carlson (2011) for a journalistic description of the
controversy surrounding this turn of events.
2116 Ignacio Siles International Journal of Communication 7(2013)
(up to 18 characters), a colon, and a space before displaying each message (one character for each),
developers settled on 140 characters.5
In the following months, the layers of remediation enacted by Twitter continued to expand.
Developers implemented new ways, in addition to SMS and the Web, to access and use the application.
Once again, they built some of these features as responses to emerging problems they faced as users. For
example, Florian Weber, who had to return to Germany while the team worked on the prototype,
experienced problems receiving messages outside the United States. As a solution, Weber thought about
implementing an access to Twitter that did not involve the use of SMS. He recalls doing what he describes
as a “quick hack” that allowed Twitter’s developers to exchange messages through IM. Some developers
then began to exchange messages this way. Because they noticed the potential value of this practice for
users, they added an IM access to Twitter as a feature in October 2006. In this sense, developers
exploited their experiences as users and their privileged access to the program’s code. During the same
month, they also implemented RSS and permalinks for timelines—two key affordances of blogging.
Innovation dynamics that characterize Silicon Valley played an important role in the development
of Twitter. This context enabled the formation of a web of interactions between groups of developers (both
inside and outside Twitter), users, and geeks who shared some of the same values and cultural ethos. It
created the grounds for exchanges between developers (functioning as privileged users) and users
(operating as developers). Important expressions of this cultural context were feedback loops established
between Twitter’s engineers and other developers. In particular, the release in September 2006 of an
application programming interface (API) embodied an invitation to other developers and users to
participate in shaping Twitter. In the fall of 2006, programmers outside the company released new
applications to use Twitter, such as Mo.ist, Celly, Twittermap, and Twitter for iChat. According to
developers, these applications significantly helped Twitter to gain new users.
Using Twitter
How users appropriated Twitter is important for understanding its development. As noted, early
users were not disconnected from Twitter’s production context. Some of them were influential figures in
the Bay Area, skilled programmers and engineers with years of professional experience, or geeks who
shared a fascination for Web technologies and services. An early developer of the application recalls:
[Twitter’s] initial community of users was centered around San Francisco, centered
around friends of Ev’s [Williams] and the other people working at Obvious [Odeo’s new
name]. . . . [Twitter] had roots in this very vocal and not necessarily influential
community, but this community that has this ability to kind of manufacture its own
influence. (Interviewee, personal communication)
5
Sagolla (2009) suggests that Odeo’s desire to reduce texting bills also motivated the adoption of this
standard.
International Journal of Communication 7 (2013) Inventing Twitter 2117
Developers and early users typically encountered each other in person during activities such as social
events, meetings, and conferences. Some users were also invited to stop by Twitter’s offices to work on
particular issues and exchange ideas. (Over the next years, these exchanges would also take place in
events such as FOO Camp.)
In addition to the new applications developed for Twitter through its API, users shaped the
application through appropriation practices that departed from Twitter’s original purposes. For example, in
the months after its launch, besides reporting their coordinates, users began using Twitter to sustain
conversations with one another and aggregate news. These user enactments can be interpreted through
the lens of remediation theories. For example, journalist Dan Gillmor, who created a Twitter account early
in 2007, appropriated Twitter to extend writing practices that dated back to the late 1990s, particularly
blogging. He explains:
A lot of my early blogging was a link, a short quote, and then my further analysis. [It]
was a way of saying to my readers, “Hey, you should take a look at this!” [With Twitter]
I reestablish[ed] that habit. (Personal communication, July 19, 2011)
In this view, Twitter remediated blogging through the lens of its simplicity and creative constraints. Evan
Williams captured the essence of this enactment when he defined Twitter as “tak[ing] blogging, tak[ing]
out all these features and limit[ing] the size of the post and that will be a whole thing” (from an interview
in Moggridge, 2010, p. 278).
Furthermore, users enacted Twitter by remediating media used to interact with others rather
than seeing it as a way to only share statuses. In late 2006, they began incorporating the @ symbol as a
way to reply to one another (Crosby, 2006). The use of the @ symbol is not accidental; it is an expression
of the common values and cultural ethos shared by both Twitter’s developers and users. The @ symbol is
a key feature of Internet Relay Chat (IRC); users commonly employ it as a reply feature. Created in the
late 1980s, IRC had experienced a revival within circles of hackers and software developers (Coleman,
2013). In this context, the use of the @ symbol resonated with developers at Twitter who had
appropriated this technology as a back channel in the context of their work, conferences, and other
activities. This enactment of Twitter led to iterative feedback loops between users and developers that
significantly shaped the application’s development (see Figure 1). As a response to this practice, Twitter’s
developers created features that helped users appropriate it as a conversational medium. As Biz Stone
(2007a) explained on Twitter’s official blog, “We started supporting this behavior by doing things like
creating the in reply to link . . . and linking the @username to a profile” (para. 1, emphasis in original).
Conversations through Twitter proliferated after these features were introduced.
As a feedback loop, interactions between users and developers had consequences for the
enactment of Twitter as a conversational medium. As developers noticed how users enacted the
application, they reflected on how to help users sustain what they defined as “relevant conversations,” as
opposed to any other type of conversation. This process led developers to distinguish between data that
pertained to the realm of relevant conversations and those that instead “polluted” user exchanges. Blaine
Cook, Twitter’s chief architect at the time and the person who implemented this change, explains:
2118 Ignacio Siles International Journal of Communication 7(2013)
There [were] too many side conversations and it kind of pollute[d] the screen. It [was]
very distracting. [We] changed it so [users] wouldn’t see those messages anymore and
[could] have a flow of communications that [were] relevant to [them]. (Personal
communication, October 22, 2011)
Developers thus implemented a feature that filtered the type of conversations that were displayed on
users’ profiles. Although at first a person’s followers on Twitter could see every conversation held by that
person, developers changed this feature to display only conversations between people followed by the
user. Whereas the latter were considered relevant conversations and therefore kept in the user’s timeline,
the former were defined as “non-relevant” and hidden from users.
Twitter’s developers also implemented new features, such as the “replies page,” launched in May
2007, to allow users to keep a record of these relevant conversations. Alex Payne, a programmer who
joined Twitter in January 2007 and managed its API, recalls:
We were keeping track of users replying to other users, but we hadn’t exposed that in
Twitter’s interface for a number of months. One afternoon, [we] said, “We’ve got the
data in here. Why don’t we just put a tab in the interface where you can see everyone
who’s replying to you?” It took five minutes to build. That’s something that the users
had started doing on their own. We just kind of picked up on it and made it easier for
them to do. (Personal communication, July 13, 2011)
International Journal of Communication 7 (2013) Inventing Twitter 2119
Figure 1. Feedback loops between Twitter’s developers and early users.
Through similar iterative feedback loops, Twitter’s developers adopted user practices and
incorporated them into the application over the next months. These included the use of the # symbol (or
“hashtag”) to categorize content and the reference to posts as “tweets” (rather than “status updates”).6
In
6
“In the spirit of simplification,” Biz Stone (2007b) explained, the term friend was also abandoned, and a
unidirectional “follower” model was adopted in July 2007.
2120 Ignacio Siles International Journal of Communication 7(2013)
August 2007, Chris Messina, a Web developer and open source advocate, began using the # symbol to
improve “contextualization, content filtering and exploratory serendipity within the Twittosphere”
(Messina, 2007, para. 1). Messina explicitly interpreted this practice as a remediation of IRC. He
explained: “It occurred to me that IRC presents a proven model for these needs with its foundation on
channels, and so that’s what I’m generally going to call them” (Messina, 2007, para. 9). Like the @
symbol, the use of hashtags illustrates the centrality of certain early users in shaping the tool. As an
experienced software developer in Silicon Valley, Messina was aptly situated to participate, through his
appropriation practices and exchanges with Twitter’s producers, in shaping this application.
Primarily because of aesthetic concerns, many Twitter’s developers resisted the use of hashtags.
Yet they incorporated the feature when the company bought a search engine that had adopted this
practice. Payne explains:
[Some developers] pushed back against us formally acknowledging hashtags for as long
as [they] could. But, eventually [Twitter] bought a company [Summize] that was
indexing tweets and providing a search engine for those tweets [that] had picked up on
the hashtag thing. . . . So when we started integrating those two products, we sort of
had to acknowledge [them]. If our search engine thinks that hashtags are a legitimate
concept, then the rest of the product probably should as well. (A. Payne, personal
communication, July 13, 2011)
In this sense, the stabilization of this feature involved feedback loops with other developers.
Certain events in the new media development field, particularly the South by Southwest (SXSW)
conference, were key in Twitter’s development. In March 2007, Williams and some members of the team
attended SXSW, a technology conference where Williams enjoyed a privileged symbolic position, to
demonstrate Twitter. SXSW was instrumental in the tool’s development for two reasons. First, it allowed
developers to recruit new geek users who later contributed to shape Twitter through their practices and
expertise. Second, it helped the application to gain more prominence in public culture. When it received
the Web Award in the blog category at SXSW, Twitter began to receive more attention from the
mainstream media.
In sum, iterative exchanges between developers and certain users resulted in the material and
symbolic transformation of Twitter. Materially, these feedback loops led to specific features that made it
easier for users to sustain conversations and filter those conversations in particular ways. Symbolically,
these interactions redefined Twitter. In 2006, when the application was launched, its website defined
Twitter as a “global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you
doing?” (Twitter, 2006). However, by 2007, when the use of Twitter as a conversational tool had
stabilized, developers modified this description to accommodate new user enactments. They redefined it
as “a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the
exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?” (Twitter, 2007,
emphasis added). In this way, Twitter became more than a program for sharing coordinates.
International Journal of Communication 7 (2013) Inventing Twitter 2121
Concluding Remarks
This article examined Twitter’s invention and early development processes by deploying an
iterative approach that accounted for the role of both developers and users, how these actors enacted
Twitter, and how their enactments and interactions crystallized into particular technological features over
time. To conclude, I elaborate on how this approach can inform our understanding of new media
development and broaden the analytical reach of extant theoretical frameworks.
By focusing on feedback loops between developers and users (iteration as an action), this article
revealed the role of both groups of actors in Twitter’s creation. An investigation of the work of developers
was crucial in making visible the dynamics that guided Twitter’s conception and production processes. It
brought to light the variety of experiences and expectations that shaped Twitter’s creation and that
crystallized in specific remediation dynamics. Yet a history of Twitter would be incomplete without a
careful consideration of users. By departing from Twitter’s prescribed uses in creative ways and
developing novel tools to expand its range of functions, early users played a crucial role in shaping the
application. In this sense, technology producers do not predefine the shape of media technologies once
and for all during design activities by remediating previous content configurations (as suggested by
scholarship on remediation). Instead, users actively enact and shape remediation through particular
practices. Thus, an account of the feedback loops between developers and users was indispensable for
explaining how Twitter was reconceived, both materially and symbolically, as a conversational medium.
The analysis of how these feedback loops evolved over time (iteration as process) demonstrated
how developers and users exchanged roles in various ways. On the one hand, developers relied on their
own user experiences of previous media technologies to imagine Twitter’s purpose(s). They also
appropriated Twitter during its early phases of development and identified problems in its use. Building on
their own appropriation practices and taking advantage of their privileged access to the program’s code,
they introduced novel features to solve the problems they identified as users. On the other hand, users
acted as developers in various ways. When programmers first imagined the set of potential appropriations
of Twitter, users operated as idealized constructions that guided the tool’s design. Moreover, when
programmers and geeks with experience in Web development were given access to Twitter, they shaped
the application by building new applications for it and by employing it in ways different than originally
anticipated. Over time, these practices led to features that were incorporated into the tool.
The focus on how Twitter was variously enacted (iteration as product) allowed tracing the
multiple pathways that shaped its configuration through both production and use activities. For its
developers, Twitter crystallized a variety of different remediation processes. Dorsey envisioned it as a new
instantiation of an online diary-writing program, instant messaging, and SMS communication. Williams
invoked his previous experience in software development when he defined Twitter as a constrained
version of blogging. Users linked Twitter to the history of conversational media and news aggregation
devices. Both developers and users built specific features to materialize these different remediation layers.
To account for this multiplicity of enactments, I posited the term multilayered intermediation. The
definition of Twitter as a new medium is, precisely, an attempt to reconcile the multiplicity of remediation
dynamics enacted during its production and use. This finding is significant in that it partly explains how
2122 Ignacio Siles International Journal of Communication 7(2013)
Twitter acquired specific material configurations.
It is important to stress the significance of the particular spatial and temporal context in which
this case unfolded. As scholars have noted, culture and place matter for both the production and
appropriation of media technologies (Balsamo, 2011; Oudshoorn, 2011). How developers and users
enacted Twitter was a partial product of their particular cultural experiences. Furthermore, the values and
dynamics that characterize Silicon Valley were crucial in bringing Twitter’s developers and users together
in particular ways and in enabling a network of exchanges between them. To be sure, there are contexts
and situations where the boundaries between producers and users are more strongly protected and
iterative dynamics less likely to unfold. In Twitter’s case, this spatial and temporal context made it
possible for certain programmers and geeks to appropriate the tool and thus perform the role of users. In
turn, Twitter’s producers envisioned these programmers as situated and legitimate actors who could
contribute to the tool’s development through their use practices and expertise. This context also allowed
developers to incorporate their own user experiences as inputs in production.
This article focused exclusively on Twitter’s early development. Yet, by identifying a series of
iterative dynamics, this approach can inform an analysis of Twitter’s subsequent evolution. In this sense,
considering how new types of users and usages have emerged and stabilized, how Twitter’s development
team has changed, how developers have worked to turn Twitter into a profitable venture, what new types
of feedback loops have emerged between increasingly large groups of developers and users, and what
types of identities Twitter has enacted over a longer time could open new avenues for research (cf. van
Dijck, 2011).
To implement this iterative approach, this article integrated various theoretical frameworks. By so
doing, this study expanded the heuristic reach of these frameworks. On the one hand, theories on
remediation were brought to bear on work on the user–technology relationship. In this sense, this analysis
extended the study of remediation dynamics by showing that media technologies are open to a multiplicity
of enactments throughout production and use activities. To account for remediation mechanisms, scholars
have privileged the study of the production and design of media technologies (Bolter & Grusin, 1999;
Hayles, 2005). Yet this article demonstrated that remediation must also be examined when media
technologies are used. By discussing the examples of the @ symbol and the hashtag, the study pointed to
the need to investigate how remediation also provides users with important symbolic and material
elements with which to enact and make sense of emerging media technologies. From this perspective,
remediation dynamics constitute a key bridge between the study of the production and the use of media.
On the other hand, theories on remediation were rethought in light of work on user agency.
Against the backdrop of Bolter and Grusin’s (1999) notion that “a medium is that which remediates” (p.
65), Twitter’s creation can be analyzed as the development of a new medium. Yet the study of Twitter’s
invention shows that remediation is not enacted through a singular and unique dynamic oriented toward
either immediacy or hypermediacy. Instead, as a medium under development, Twitter enacted various
layers of remediation through software design dynamics and user practices (see Table 1). In this sense,
the notion of enactment helps to broaden our understanding of remediation processes.
International Journal of Communication 7 (2013) Inventing Twitter 2123
Furthermore, work on the agency of users has emphasized how media technologies acquire
different configurations as they are enacted through use activities. Orlikowski (2000) thus distinguishes
between technologies as artifacts (i.e., assemblages of material and symbolic properties) and
technologies-in-practice (i.e., the specific ways in which users enact these sociomaterial assemblages in
particular ways). Yet Orlikowski (2000, p. 414) reserves the notion of enactment to conceptualize user
practices and characterizes media technologies instead by enumerating some of their properties. As a
supplement, this analysis revealed that the enactment of technology does not begin in and is not exclusive
to use activities. In other words, technologies do not become technologies-as-practice exclusively when
they are used; the multiple ways in which they are enacted during production and development activities
are also critical for their understanding as technologies-in-practice. Therefore, a consideration of how
media technologies are variously enacted must be extended to production processes and to the
interactions between use, production, and intermediary activities.
In summary, understanding how media technologies emerge and develop in dynamic ways
requires considering how actors such as developers and users engage in various practices through which
they enact media technologies, how these actors interact, and how these enactments and feedback loops
crystallize into specific artifacts over time. At stake in the study of these processes is not only an
understanding of how media technologies such as Twitter can be aptly defined but the provision of
foundations for rethinking how they emerge, change, and evolve over time.
2124 Ignacio Siles International Journal of Communication 7(2013)
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