March 21, 2016

It Is Not Twitter’s Birthday

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Hello.

How are you? Feeling good? Feeling spry? You look good. You look spry!

I’ve got some bad news for you, my spry, good-looking friend. You have been making a fool of yourself today.

“Twitter is 10 years old today,” you tweeted.

“Happy birthday, Twitter,” you tweeted.

“Happy 10th anniversary, Twitter,” you tweeted.

Blah blah blah.

YOU TWEETED LIES.

It is not Twitter’s birthday.

Today is March 21. Twitter’s birthday is July 15.

Today is just the anniversary of the first tweet, which Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sent out on March 21, 2006. But Twitter itself was not released to the public until July 15, 2006. That is its birthday. That is how birthdays work.

The Wire explained this a few years ago:

Today we are not celebrating Twitter’s birth, but rather founder Jack Dorsey’s first tweet:

Sure, this is cause for celebration. But only in the same way as a baby’s first kicks in the womb are exciting. At the moment of that tweet (or twt?), Twitter was just a fetus of a site. Its parents, Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, were thinking about what Twitter might look and act like when it made its public debut. They hadn’t even settled on the name yet.

Twitter didn’t pop out of the womb, or “become born” until July 15, 2006, with the public launch of the site. Stone made the announcement on his personal site. And Twitter, “a new mobile service that helps groups of friends bounce random thoughts around with SMS” entered the world.

Please stop saying that it is Twitter’s birthday. That is all.

Have a great day.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

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