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”…