You see back in the day we had to dial into a BBS to post messages, but not everybody had the same BBS, but no worries because the ARPANET became the internet and people could post across newsgroups, but it was all text unless you uuencoded -- sad face emoticon! But happy face emoji because hurray for TCP/IP for the masses and Netscape Navigator! Forget posting to a newsgroup because I don't care what you have to say! I got my own homesteaded Geocities web page so behold my brilliance (just not right now: 
). The primordial blog was born!
Meanwhile cellular phones (as they were once called) were becoming commonplace and people wondered if those letters above the numbers could be fashioned together to type out Western Union-like telegrams because nothing says progress than doing old things with new tech and whamo presto SMS protocols were codified. You could say anything so long as you stayed within 160 characters, but generally you would never get that far because you had to press the 6 key three times to get the letter O for crying out loud!
Fast forward a bit to internet 1.2 alpha and we've shunned Geocities and are pushing our shiny new auto generated Word Press blogs. We now have things to say, but unfortunately it's obscure and deadly dull and no matter how many times we cajole our friends we can never get them to visit our blog more than a couple of times. It was a lonely, lonely time.
While we waited for visitors we ventured out and found special interest message boards (like this here board), and early social media sites. We were happy with the message boards, but true social media failed because nobody had yet figured out a way to incentivize social reciprocation. In other words, I'll like your stupid baby picture if you comment on my awesome snowboard video.
The other missing component for social media was aggregation. Enter RSS! Unfortunately everybody that used RSS in its raw form had ten thousand unread articles in their feed and everybody that didn't use RSS asked, "what's RSS?"
Our social media was aggregated with internet 2.0 and Facebook and our feeds were inundated with stupid baby pictures. Things started to shift away from "me" and back to "you." Which, of course, is unacceptable. Maybe the original unidirectional blogs weren't so bad after all. Okay maybe there would be a bit of reciprocation: "I'll follow you if you follow me", but we needed a way to get in and get out quickly, share our importance, while only reading about interesting people and things in an aggregated way. What better way to to convey this importance than blogging while mobile (I'm too busy with important life stuff to sit at a computer!), and with that micro-blogging and Twitter came into being. (I would still have deadly dull things to say, but it would be so brief that you would be done reading it before you had a chance to stop reading it -- so HA!)
Even though the internet was 2.0, cell phones, as they were now called, were mostly dumb and the lowest common denominator in mobile text communication was still SMS with its 160 character limitation (minus 20 with some Twitter overhead).
So that's that twitter thing that your employer is blocking you from reading on your computer because you don't use Twitter on your smart phone which now, by the way, is just called your phone.
You're welcome! Happy face emoji: 
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