The Real History of the @reply on Twitter
I have always half-jokingly taken credit for inventing the @reply on Twitter. Or at least for starting its wide-spread use on Twitter–I got the idea from seeing people do it over at Flickr, where it had been happening for more than a year. But until today I continued to claim I was the first person to do it on Twitter. Recently, user @rabble put together a blog post titled Origin of the @reply - Digging Through Twitter’s History, in which he did some research to show when it was first used. Only his research isn’t entirely correct and it doesn’t give fair credit to everyone involved.
It turns out that I’m not the inventor of the @reply, though I’m definitely one of the pioneers. Robert Andersen seems to be the father of the @reply on Twitter. He sent this message on November 2, 2006 at 8:58PM (all times in this post are Pacific–if you’re reading this from the Tumblr Dashboard, all the dates will look funky):
@ buzz - you broke your thumb and youre still twittering? that’s some serious devotion
— Robert S Andersen (@rsa)November 3, 2006
A few weeks later, on November 21, 2006 at 3:19PM, Jon Hicks tweeted:
@ james - hicksdesign, post xmas, will be me + wife leigh
— Jon Hicks (@Hicksdesign)November 21, 2006
After that message there was a lull and then, for some reason, on November 23, 2006, myself and a bunch of other people started using the @reply all on the same day. Collective consciousness, I suppose, considering I’ve never seen any of these people’s tweets before and they’ve never seen mine. Whatever it was that started this, it happened early that morning when Neil Crosby tweeted:
@kapowaz: probably
— Neil Crosby (@NeilCrosby)November 23, 2006
And at 2:10AM, Ben Darlow responded in kind:
@Neil Crosby: would this regex match the ‘directed message’ thing I mentioned earlier? ^@([^:]):
— Ben Darlow (@kapowaz)November 23, 2006
And a few minutes later, Rachel Andrew:
@ kapowaz - yup
— Rachel Andrew (@rachelandrew)November 24, 2006
These first few @replies were all connected. You can see this as a pattern in the initial use of the construct. For instance, a few hours later, I used it for the first time to reply to Indranil Dasgupta’s question at 8:11AM:
@Indranil: SimpleLog 2.0 (calling it 2.0 now) will be released next week (I hope, I hope, I hope).
— Garrett Murray (@garrettmurray)November 23, 2006
And then minutes later, at 8:15AM, Elisabeth Iskrem P tweeted in the same thread (back before there was such a thing):
@ Indranil: It’s all or nothing
— Elisabeth Iskrem P (@elisabethicp)November 23, 2006
And to bring this full circle, a few days later, I used the @reply to reply to Robert Andersen, my pal and the father of the @reply on Twitter:
@Bobby: Didn’t you email me a while back about coming up with a song for the podcast?
— Garrett Murray (@garrettmurray)November 29, 2006
I’ll have to stop claiming I invented the @reply now, but it’s nice to have been a part of the group who helped get it started. It’s very hard to search back this far in Twitter, so if anyone finds earlier examples or an error on my part, please let me know. And thanks to Shawn for helping me find some of these early tweets.
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Great story about how the @reply became common on Twitter, and how many of their best features like the #hashtag came...
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It’s not just the @-as-a-reply that was driven by users. Anything that meant anything inside the tweet was - which means...
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psutlt reblogged this from maniacalrage and added:
I think we were doing this fairly early in ETS as well.
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