Famous First Words

Today is the fifth anniversary of the first Twitter Tweet. Not the most momentous of anniversaries perhaps but it is still impressive to see how much progress Twitter has made in such a short space of time. If you were wondering what the first tweet was, it was "just setting up my twttr", whilst the first words mentioned on YouTube were, "Alright, so here we are in front of the elephants." (At the time the founder of YouTube was standing in front of an elephant at San Diego zoo.)

There are more of these in this BBC article, including "Come here Mr Watson, I want to see you" (First telephone message, 1876 - Mr Watson was Alexander Bell's assistant), and "Merry Christmas" (First text message, 1992). Can you remember your first text / email / phone call?

Obama Tweets

We're now following Barack Obama's Twitter feed. He's currently got 1.6 million followers, which is 1 million more than the official White House feed. Sarah Palin meanwhile has just started twittering, so see what you make of her comments here (which seem to be mainly about fish...)

Historical Tweets

This site is quite amusing - what would historical figures have written if they had access to Twitter?

Here's one from Johannes Gutenberg

and here's Abraham Lincoln asking for speech-writing advice

We're on Twitter

Nonsuch HP has tentatively established a presence on Twitter. We're known as nonsuchhp and you can find us here. We will initially use it to send updates about the blog but if you know of other useful ways to use Twitter, please let us know!