The first thing I ever heard about Twitter the social network was that it wouldn't be the next Facebook. I heard that it could be a supplement to Facebook, that it was too different to even be considered on the same playing field. Maybe a unique social network is just what I need!, I thought.
I was determined not to let this Twitter thing catch me off-guard like its predecessors, so I did a little deep thought. What could I expect from a "different" social networking experience? I supposed it would be something hard to guess, since it wouldn't be very different otherwise. I decided that the secret must be in that cryptic name -- "Twitter"? What was up with that? "Twitter" is something my heart does after my first kiss, not the name of a website!
So I tried thinking outside the box. What else could "twitter" mean?
I thought, "twit" can mean "idiot", so maybe it's a website for idiots? British idiots, based on the vocabulary involved. But that seemed too obvious, so I tried to think of other things that "twit" could be. I eventually came to the conclusion that "twit" could be a different onomatopoeia for "tweet", like the twittering of birds.
So was Twitter a website for birds? It seemed reasonable at first -- birds are rather important, after all. Turkeys are birds; without turkeys we’d have to skip Thanksgiving every year, which would eventually make the months go out of sync with the seasons. But something about that just seemed wrong. I couldn't recall ever seeing a bird use a computer, and there would need to be a reasonable number of them doing so to necessitate the existence of a social network such as Twitter.
That's when it hit me: this wasn’t a site for birds, it was a site for birds, with a wink wink and a nudge nudge. "Birds" from the 1930s who are still kickin' around and need to get in contact with all their birdy friends. Who knows what they might talk about? Now I was on to something!
And could it be that the name "Twitter" contained a double meaning of sorts? I reasoned that, if the marketing genius behind a name that crafty could have one obscure meaning, surely they could have two. "Twit" is barely one key off "tit", and tits would certainly reach a wider demographic than old women from the '30s, right? But selling to both markets would be even smarter!
I decided that there was only one logical meaning behind Twitter's name: that Twitter was a social network for 80-year-old women to show off their tits. Made sense to me, and seemed more original than Facebook and MySpace had been. I knew that Twitter had to be something special to make people praise it so much.
Swelling with pride, I registered for Twitter. Half an hour later, I realized that it was yet another site for people to whine about their boring-ass lives, and most definitely not a place to discuss granny tits.
What a gyp.