Kate Bussmann - A Twitter Year: 365 Days in 140 Characters

To @alexavh, who came up with the idea,
and @robinmciver, who suffered the consequences

@KateBussmann Kate Bussmann
Welcome to the ebook edition hope you like it! Tweet me and let me know what you think
#ATwitterYear 21 Nov

First published in 2011

This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright 2011 by Kate Bussmann
Text of tweets individual tweeters

Twitter is a trademark of Twitter, Inc.
and is used with the permission of Twitter, Inc.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

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In 2011, Twitter came of age. You dont even need to have visited the website to know that: tweets are now routinely quoted in newspapers and on television, and hashtags and usernames have started to appear where websites and email addresses used to go. Over the past 12 months, its made plenty of headlines of its own too, most notably for the way it helped revolutionaries in the Arab world spread the word about atrocities and upcoming demonstrations. Its so pervasive, in fact, that its hard to believe that the website is only five years old.

The brainchild of American software expert Jack Dorsey, Twitter was originally conceived simply as a way to share short messages with friends. Dorsey sent the first tweet on 21 March 2006, and the full version rolled out to the public on 15 July that year. For a long time it was dismissed as irrelevant; an unnecessary equivalent of the status update feature in Facebook. Gradually, however, it proved itself far more useful than anyone could have predicted. The brevity of a tweet, maximum 140 characters, lends itself neatly to headlines and reportage of fast-moving events. Even if you dont tweet yourself, you can use it as a news aggregator, following any individual or organisation youre interested in, or searching by subject using hashtags. The retweet function means that news and information is easily and quickly disseminated. The cleverly simple way that an @ symbol allows you to communicate with any other user on Twitter means not only that conversations are easily struck up between strangers, but that fans can speak directly to their idols, and voters to their elected representatives. And that 140-character limit makes it a perfect format for pithy remarks which explains why comedians are amongst the most followed but perhaps surprisingly, it is also often enough to convey a great deal of emotion.

Source: Twitter

to influence the conversation. And this year, plenty of us did just that.

Source: Twitter

YEARS TIMELINE OF PEAK TWEETING

The events that inspired the tweetiest moments of the year, measured in tweets per second (TPS)

The Most Influential Twitter Accounts

The Most-followed Twitter Accounts

Editorial note

All the tweets in this book are replicated as youd see them on Twitter: grammar and spelling have not been corrected, and where there are multiple variations on a name (e.g. Gaddafi/Qadhafi), they are left as they were originally typed.

When it came to deciding which events to focus on with dedicated live-tweet sections, some major news, cultural and sports stories were obvious choices. Some were events that provoked a lot of conversation and jokes on Twitter. A third set were incidents that may have been mainly of interest to a small group of people, but involved Twitter itself in one way or another; the story of Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark, using the site to find people who needed help in the aftermath of a blizzard, is one such example.

Any regular user of Twitter will notice that this book does not read like the average timeline: retweets have mainly been avoided, and there are very few @ replies. Excluding A Tweet a Day, the section of this book that gives you an overview of the entire year, tweets that link to news stories or pictures have also largely been ignored. Instead the focus is on the commentary, observation and humour that the Twitterverse is so good at.

With a few exceptions, the tweets chosen were originally written in English. This was for the sake of simplicity, but the focus throughout has nonetheless remained as much as possible on first-hand witnesses of, say, the events in Tahrir Square or the Japanese earthquake. In a few cases, however, an exception was made to this rule: you wont find the tweets sent by children on Utya island desperately seeking help, nor the ones sent later by parents trying to find the missing.

IMPORTANT

The year in this book runs from October 2010 to September 2011.

Twitter constantly updates its statistics. Those given in the book are accurate at the time of compilation.

All links were live at time of compilation but as Twitter is constantly changing we cannot guarantee that all links will remain active.