kathleen forden

lately i’ve been educated by the younger people i work with on my day job, on the way that language is changing “in the wild” (my tags for real life)

LolCats (http://icanhascheezburger.com/) was one of the first to start using it, but not the only one and twitter hit it out of the ballpark with the micro text portion
not only are these sites and adoptees changing the spelling of words, they are also changing the quantity and style of the written word

i do it
for my personal taste i forgo the limits enforced by punctuation and proper grammar
do i know them
yes, i do -  i just chose to not worry about them while i am expressing my thoughts on my personal blog

so knowing that change is evident and closing in fast, i started searching and found a wonderful discovery – the guide below

http://www.140characters.com
– while going through the site, i discovered the history page

<excerpt>

The original post “How Twitter Was Born” follows.

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Twitter was born about three years ago, when @Jack, @Biz, @Noah, @Crystal, @Jeremy, @Adam, @TonyStubblebine, @Ev, me (@Dom), @Rabble, @RayReadyRay, @Florian, @TimRoberts, and @Blaine worked at a podcasting company called Odeo, Inc. in South Park, San Francisco. The company had just contributed a major chunk of code to Rails 1.0 and had just shipped Odeo Studio, but we were facing tremendous competition from Apple and other heavyweights. Our board was not feeling optimistic, and we were forced to reinvent ourselves.

“Rebooting” or reinventing the company started with a daylong brainstorming session where we broke up into teams to talk about our best ideas. I was lucky enough to be in @Jack’s group, where he first described a service that uses SMS to tell small groups what you are doing. We happened to be on top of the slide on the north end of South Park. It was sunny and brisk. We were eating Mexican food. His idea made us stop eating and start talking.

I remember that @Jack’s first use case was city-related: telling people that the club he’s at is happening. “I want to have a dispatch service that connects us on our phones using text.” His idea was to make it so simple that you don’t even think about what you’re doing, you just type something and send it. Typing something on your phone in those days meant you were probably messing with T9 text input, unless you were sporting a relatively rare smartphone. Even so, everyone in our group got the idea instantly and wanted it.

Later, each group presented their ideas, and a few of them were selected for prototyping. Demos ensued. @Jack’s idea rose to the top as a combination of status-type ideas. @Jack, @Biz, and @Florian were assigned to build version 0.1, managed by @Noah. The rest of the company focused on maintaining Odeo.com, so that if this new thing flopped we’d have something to fall back upon.

The first version of @Jack’s idea was entirely web-based. It was created on March 21st, 2006. My first substantive message is #38:

Read more and preorder the book - “140 Characters – A Style Guide for the Short Form”