Today the Internet is celebrating Twitter’s 10th birthday—the social network is marking the occasion with the hashtag #LoveTwitter, embedding a heart and Twitter bird after every use.
Many people and organizations didn’t know what to make of Twitter, even after they created accounts. This is especially obvious after looking at the site’s “Discover your first tweet” function, which logs every account’s first 140-character burst, no matter how awkward.
News outlets in particular were very tentative when starting out, not doing much more than tweeting out headlines and links. In fact, many of the hyperlinks in those early tweets don’t work, which in some ways isn’t surprising—bit.ly linking wasn’t very common in the mid-2000s:
Most media personalities just carried on a normal conversation when they joined Twitter—Rupert Murdoch recommended a book, while Arianna Huffington talked about the economy.
