Is Twitter Telegram 3.0?

“URGENT STOP New romantics discovered STOP Send poetry and drawings STOP Survival depends on it STOP Gratefully END D. H. Lawrence”

I was composing a Tweet the other day, struggling to squeeze my message into 140 characters, and I started thinking about the evolution of how we are communicating in the global, social economy world today. As an educator and strategic advisor, I often take a step back to think about the trends, patterns, history we are enacting and how they play out in our everyday business and personal lives.

It suddenly hit me: Twitter (and text messaging, for that matter) is the evolution of the telegram 200+ plus years later. The instructions on the telegram, “Message goes here. Be brief.” That seems familiar: be brief, 140 characters, you get the connection.  According to Retro-Gram, back when telegrams started,  if  simple poetic brevity wasn’t good enough, some people resorted to the use of code to make their telegrams as short — and as cheap — as possible.  As early as 1845, independent entrepreneurs published books of codes for use in telegrams.  You can see it in old black and white movies: “Just arrived in Paris. STOP. Wish you were here. STOP”

Someone mentioned recently that Twitter was the Hotmail of this decade, in terms of creating a new paradigm, and I do agree with that. It’s easy to forget that Hotmail was revolutionary at the time.  Up until then, our email was company- or ISP-based (remember “You’ve Got Mail”), and Hotmail set us free in terms of customizing communications channels to suit our personal and professional needs. The Hotmail web-based email service was founded by Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia and launched in July of 1996.  Hard to believe it was a mere 13 years ago.

But the struggling with 140-character format is what prompted me to go back even further. I remember my Grandfather was a Lt. Col. in the Army and in a scrapbook had saved copies of important telegrams from WWII when he commanded troops in Greece. Before long-distance telephone services were readily available or affordable, telegram services were very popular.  Telegrams were often used to confirm business dealings and, unlike email, telegrams were commonly used to create binding legal documents for business dealings. The height of the telegram age was probably the 1920s and ‘30s, when Western Union maintained a fleet of 14,000 uniformed messenger boys, on foot and on bicycle, and many thousands more of operators, clerks, and copyists.  Then came the famous Singing Telegram, popularized by Western Union.

Telegraph Telecom Definition

1. An apparatus or process for communicating information over a distance by coded signals. Simple telegraphs employ smoke signals, drums, mirrors, flags, fires, lanterns, and mechanical semaphores. 2. The electric telegraph was invented by Samuel F.B. Morse (1791)

In 1998 Tom Standage wrote a book called The Victorian Internet which explores the historical development of the telegraph and the social ramifications associated with the development of this technology. He says that the development of the telegraph essentially mirrored the development of the Internet. Both technologies can be seen to have largely impacted the speed and transmission of information.

Fast forward to Twitter 2009 and we are composing and transmitting thousands of “written messages destined for far off places”, thousands of times a day.  It’s a wonderful world, indeed.

Beverly Macy is the Managing Partner of Y&M Partners and teaches a social media class at UCLA. Y&M just launched the “Pay it Forward 2009” project.

Tagged as: history, hotmail, telegram, telegraph, Twitter