March 21, 2016

It Is Not Twitter’s Birthday

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Hello.

How are you? Feeling good? Feeling spry? You look good. You look spry!

I’ve got some bad news for you, my spry, good-looking friend. You have been making a fool of yourself today.

“Twitter is 10 years old today,” you tweeted.

“Happy birthday, Twitter,” you tweeted.

“Happy 10th anniversary, Twitter,” you tweeted.

Blah blah blah.

YOU TWEETED LIES.

It is not Twitter’s birthday.

Today is March 21. Twitter’s birthday is July 15.

Today is just the anniversary of the first tweet, which Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sent out on March 21, 2006. But Twitter itself was not released to the public until July 15, 2006. That is its birthday. That is how birthdays work.

The Wire explained this a few years ago:

Today we are not celebrating Twitter’s birth, but rather founder Jack Dorsey’s first tweet:

Sure, this is cause for celebration. But only in the same way as a baby’s first kicks in the womb are exciting. At the moment of that tweet (or twt?), Twitter was just a fetus of a site. Its parents, Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, were thinking about what Twitter might look and act like when it made its public debut. They hadn’t even settled on the name yet.

Twitter didn’t pop out of the womb, or “become born” until July 15, 2006, with the public launch of the site. Stone made the announcement on his personal site. And Twitter, “a new mobile service that helps groups of friends bounce random thoughts around with SMS” entered the world.

Please stop saying that it is Twitter’s birthday. That is all.

Have a great day.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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