Twitter, twenty years of insights and failures: from the first 'service' tweet to the model's crisis

The first tweet was not the most inspired. It is 21 March 2006 and the history of Twitter begins with a sentence that sounds like a system test: 'Just setting up my twttr'. Jack Dorsey wrote it. Behind the scenes, a 2000s start-up quartet: Noah Glass, Biz Stone, Evan Williams. "We wanted to capture that feeling," Dorsey confessed to The Observer years later. "The physical sensation of vibrating in your friend's pocket. It's like vibrating all over the world." A pocket vibration. A global vibration.

Twenty years after that tweet, the history of Twitter - today's X - is a manual of digital economics written in strokes of genius intuition and industrial autogol. Twitter was born from the ashes of Odeo, the wrong project at the wrong time: podcasts before the iPhone. It fails. But from failures, in Silicon Valley, cognitive capital is extracted. Glass intuits, Dorsey designs, Williams finances. The result is a microblog, something new.

Then something typical for platforms happened: users got their hands on it and invented something successful. The hashtag was not born in the company, but by Chris Messina in 2007. The hashtag becomes an index of the world. In 2014 it enters the Oxford Dictionary. Before that it entered geopolitics.

Only a few years pass and Twitter becomes a piazza. A distributed news agency. A global sensor. It chronicles the San Francisco earthquake, the 2009 Iran protest, the Arab Spring, the #MeToo. It is the place where the news happens as it is being written. A free information infrastructure built on top of a fragile business model.

Here comes the first big failure: monetisation. Twitter grows, influences, but grosses little. In 2013, it quotes itself. It never finds the advertising formula of Meta Platforms. It never becomes a money-making machine. Too much conversation, too little profiling. Too much politics, few happy advertisers. Meanwhile it experiments, but experiments badly.