#twttr

Aint no one's gonna fool me, i know we gonna get some event regarding Willow and Lugia after go fest finale for the next season coming up (i mean, the model is labeled as "Season8" so that MUST mean something!)

Twitter was never politically neutral. Which is fine but, they should've never claimed or positioned themselves to be either.

People need to understand where Twitter came from originally.

It is born out of the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, and those radical left-wing activists on the ground there.

Indymedia was founded in '99 to cover WTO.

Indymedia writers/activists at WTO were coordinating via email and SMS. This creates a problem in that information is fractured across small groups. If police move into an area, or someone needs help, broadly propagating this knowledge becomes problematic. Information must be moved manually, using clunky mobile phones with terrible keypads.

When in a quickly evolving environment such as a massive demonstration in a city, where you're trying to inform a mass of people: it does not scale at all.

A better solution is needed...

Enter TXTMob.

Learning from difficulties of WTO, hackers like Rabble (Evan Henshaw-Plath) at Indymedia create new tools such as TXTMob to push and pull info from the ground.

TXTMob is basically an email listserve for mobile SMS. Every SMS sent to the number, is then forwarded on to every other user signed up to receive the SMS. It's like group chat with several hundred people. You could subscribe to individual groups, or take in the whole feed.

One may view SMS as primitive. In the 90s and early 2000s, where internet capable phones were a luxury, and data could cost you $10 a megabyte(!!), group SMS with hundreds of people was cutting edge, high-tech stuff back then; deployed in a cost effective method, to a broad range of users.

TXTMob floats around inside the Indymedia crowd until it goes live during the DNC and RNC protests in 2004...

Meanwhile, Rabble (Indymedia Founder and creator of TXTMob) is Employee #1 over at Odeo hacking on that codebase in 2004 and '05...

Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams are at Odeo too... They brainstorm taking TXTMob mainstream... twttr (Twitter) is born in 2006...

The rest is history.

The Twitter you know today is a glossy and polished version of a group SMS tool originally created for radical left-wing groups to organise, coordinate protest movements, and alert activists of police activity.

If people wonder why Twitter is so left-wing and hostile to other causes: That's probably because it's their platform, and always has been.

That's fine, but, they should be open about it.