The Origin of the Retweet and other Twitter Arcana

Sometimes you blink and a decade goes by. In this case, it is well on 12 years. I thought I would get this down on paper before I forget it all.

Twitter is certainly the oddest amazing story I’ve been able to witness up close in my 25 years in tech. It has been covered at length in so many places and in such detail since its surprise ascendancy at SxSW in 2007 that sometimes now it is hard to remember the first year when it was an aspiring SMS service that was missing a vowel. Back then, “tweet” or “tweeting” wasn’t a thing. You “twittered” and you actually thought extra hard when you did because you were sending a text to an unknown number of people and for some of those recipients that twitter SMS was a surcharge on their phone bill!

I’ve always adopted a stance Ev articulated well at some point — that “nobody actually invents anything on the Internet” recognizing that instead you build on what is already there. I distinctly remember the day when after watching Dick Costolo give a pre-IPO roadshow presentation I was struck when Chris Sacca introduced me to someone as the “guy who invented the retweet.” Sacca is a preternatural marketer. It was generous, innocuous, and very concise but it made me a bit uncomfortable because I am, well, pedantic. Nevertheless, I took (albeit uncomfortably) the moniker and assumed a form of creation myth which now years later I’d like to unpack.

Because, the thing is. I didn’t invent the retweet in use today.