Twitter turns the big one-five

© Mark Ollig

In July 2006, a new no-cost, Short Message Service (SMS) texting platform began operating in San Francisco.

SMS wasn’t new in 2006.

Dec. 3, 1992, an engineer named Neil Papwort sent the first test SMS message using his personal computer. He sent the message “Merry Christmas” to a friend’s mobile cellphone.

Today, you and I commonly send SMS instant text messages over our smartphones to friends, family, and co-workers.

Digressing back to July 2006, while having lunch in a city park, Odeo employee Jack Dorsey proposed to his colleagues a new and effective method for sending text messaging updates among large groups of people using mobile phones and online computers.

Odeo was a podcasting aggregator technology collecting news for redistribution onto websites.

Dorsey and Isaac “Biz” Stone built the new text-based messaging prototype they originally named Twttr.

It was spelled, “Twttr”, with no vowels because folks, in the beginning, used it just between mobile devices, and the SMS five-character shortcode 89887 spelled “twttr.”

The tweeting amongst the birds in the park partly inspired the name given to this new texting service.

Its first text message sent by engineer Jack Dorsey read, “just setting up my twttr.”

Six months after Twttr started, its name changed to today’s familiar Twitter, because someone else previously obtained the 89887 SMS shortcode name (twttr).

Noah Glass, who founded Odeo, chose the name Twitter.

According to Merriam Webster’s online dictionary, the word “twitter” means “to utter successive chirping noises – to utter in chirps or twitters – to talk in a chattering fashion.”

So, chirping birds inspired today’s text “tweets” over the Twitter online social media platform.

At the start, engineers set Twitter messages at a maximum of 140 characters in length to fit inside the limits of a mobile phone text message; today, it is 280 characters in a single tweet message.

Ruby is a high-level application framework software operating on Twitter’s web server.

Twitter also uses the general-purpose C++ programming code, in addition to JAVA and Scala.

The US is the country with the most significant number of Twitter users, at 73 million. Japan follows with 54 million, and the UK has 18 million.

Twitter originally asked its users to tweet messages about what they are doing.

Today, there are 206 million daily active users on Twitter.

Worldwide, those 25 to 34 years old make up the largest share of Twitter users.

In the US, those aged 18 to 29 make up 42 percent of our country’s Twitter population, while people 30 to 49 hold 27 percent. Folks 50 to 64 make up 18 percent, and those 65 or better come in at 7 percent.

While Twitter has 322 million users worldwide and gets a lot of press coverage, it is overshadowed by Facebook, with its 2.8 billion users. YouTube follows with 2.3 billion users.

One of the earliest Minnesota Twitter articles I found is from Jan. 27, 2007, Minneapolis Star Tribune, in a column by James Lileks titled “Do you Twitter? You will.”

The hashtag (#) feature on Twitter (which groups tweets by subject) made its first appearance in August 2007. A Twitter user thought of the hashtag idea.

The 2020 statistics show users sent more than 200 billion Twitter messages, with 700 million being politically related.

San Francisco, CA is Twitter’s primary location, with employees working in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and the state of Washington.

At the end of 2020, Twitter employed 5,500 people. Its web page is http://www.twitter.com.

In addition to tweeting about what we are doing, the leading reason found for being on Twitter these days, based on its usage, is to get news and information.

Each online minute, 319 new Twitter users are registered.

As of March 2021, former president Barack Obama is the most followed Twitter user, with 130 million followers.

Happy 15th anniversary Twitter; you show no signs of slowing down.

Twitter logo from 2006

Time to de-clutter

© Mark Ollig

While surveying my residence, I became aware of the numerous items displayed on the shelves, tables, and walls.

Items not displayed are stored inside cardboard boxes and those large, lidded plastic storage bins.

For years, not only mine, but I would wager, many of your closets, garages, and basements contain many unopened storage containers.

With the children long gone from the house, and many of us approaching retirement age, we find ourselves still living in cramped quarters, wondering why we don’t have more living space.

We are storing many of the possessions from not only our children’s youth, but from ours, too.

Some of us have come to the realization we have accumulated too much “stuff,” and it’s time to do something about it.

After considering the number of boxes and containers, I experienced a moment of clarity and thought, “Why am I keeping all this stuff?”

I reasoned it was because of their sentimental value, and knowing I still have the item containing a special memory for me.

Even if I haven’t seen a memento or specific item for years, I still have a sense of satisfaction and reassurance, knowing it still exists somewhere inside a storage box.

The boxes are all neatly stored, with their contents identified, but it is evident that there are just too many of them.

I need to do some serious de-cluttering.

My plan had always been to give my kids much of these stored-away items when they became adults.

I assumed the sentimental value they had for an item in their youth would still be there as an adult.

There are boxes filled with my kids’ old toys, model cars, books, crayon drawings, completed school assignment papers, board games, and parts from electronic video games and radio-controlled vehicles.

There are boxes containing photo albums with pictures of birthdays, school activities, holidays, and other family get-togethers that could be digitized and stored.

Other boxes contain items too numerous to mention, but you get the idea.

Over the years, I have contacted my kids about stopping by and picking up some of these boxes, but was surprised to learn they don’t want them.

“I have no place to keep all that stuff,” each of them adamantly tells me.

I persisted about the items having sentimental value and how they’ll appreciate having them to look back on when they reach my age.

That line of reasoning didn’t work very well, although they did end up taking a few items to keep their old man happy.

Now, when it comes to my silver coins collected and saved over the years, that is an entirely different matter.

It seems my adult children have plenty of space for those.

Too many boxes filled with things no longer used and rarely looked through needed a solution.

I felt throwing away some of them would feel like I was discarding memories. So, instead, I have allowed the boxes and containers to occupy considerable floor and closet space.

As difficult as it may be, I’ve decided it’s time to sort, sell, and donate what I no longer need inside those cardboard boxes and plastic containers.

Downsizing is the subject of much discussion, especially among the folks in my age group.

Some people downsize because they no longer need to be living in a large house and want to move into a smaller one that is easier to manage and move around in.

Other singles and couples desire to experience new adventures traveling across the country and decide to downsize, sell their house or move out of their rented residences, and take to the open road, living full-time in an RV or travel trailer.

Many doing this cannot part with all their boxes full of stuff, so they decide to store them in a commercial rental warehouse storage unit.

These folks pay a monthly fee for securely storing boxes they probably have not, and will not open for years, if ever.

There is an alternate solution for dealing with the emotional separation from our beloved boxes of stuff.

Penn State University conducted a field study on how to successfully part with and de-clutter stored items.

Their research showed people were willing to separate themselves from personal items if they took photos before parting with them.

“We found that people are more willing to give up these possessions if we offer them a way to keep the memory and the identity associated with that memory,” explained Rebecca Reczek, co-author of the field study.

“Don’t Pack up Your Sentimental Clutter . . . Just Keep a Photo of It, Then Donate,” reads a sign hanging on a wall at Penn State.

While I won’t be roaming from town to town in an RV, I will be taking video and photos of my stored away stuff before parting with the items I no longer will physically keep.

We can digitally store the video and photos in The Cloud.

As for the silver coins, de-cluttering them won’t be a problem.

Time to de-clutter!
(Image right-to-use fee paid)

The internet and its future

© Mark Ollig

During the last year and a half, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a dramatic increase in people using the internet platform for work and attending school.

This month, the number of users on the internet will reach 5 billion. Currently, 7.6 billion people are living on Earth.

With more of the world’s population embracing the future of work and learning using the internet, who is best to predict its future than one of its founding fathers?

Vint Cerf is the co-designer of the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) supporting the internet architecture.

In 1973, Cerf and his colleague, Robert Kahn, developed the essential TCP/IP communication protocols, which are at the heart of the internet we use today.

Both are known as “founding fathers of the internet.”

Cerf began his work at the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), playing a pivotal role in developing internet and internet-related data-packet technologies.

Asked how he and Kahn established the internet’s TCP/IP protocols, Cerf said, “In 1970‚ there was a single telephone company in the United States called AT&T, and its technology was called circuit switching. That was all any telecom engineer worried about.”

In deference to Cerf, I would point out that in 1970 there were more than 1,500 independent telephone companies in the United States, including the Winsted Telephone Company, where this columnist worked.

But, I digress.

Instead of telephone circuit switching, Cerf and Kahn decided on a different switching platform to use for various computer operating systems.

Working together during the early 1970s in the US government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), Cerf and Kahn developed and tested whether computers could interconnect through a packet-switching medium.

“We were struggling to make sure that the protocols are as robust as possible. We went through several implementations of them, until finally, we started implementing them on as many different operating systems as we could,” Cerf said during a 2012 Internet Hall of Fame interview.

Jan. 1, 1983, the internet as we know it began.

The internet remained a text-based command-line network for the next 10 years, although ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)-based end-user character encoded programs were available.

By 1991, the Gopher protocol, developed at the University of Minnesota, provided a file-like hierarchical text menu arrangement to search through collections of files stored on computer servers connected to the internet.

The internet took on a dramatic role change in 1993, when it became the supporting framework for a software overlay program called the World Wide Web, which Tim Berners-Lee created.

Last month, journalist and founding editor of Wired Italy, Riccardo Luna, talked withCerf.

When Luna asked how the internet could be better, Cerf replied, “We should look at things in historical perspective. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell certainly did not think about smartphones when he invented the telephone. And to access the internet 30 years ago you needed a telephone connection. Now, Elon Musk is trying to connect the remote areas of the world via satellite. In short, technologies change.”

Was Cerf surprised the internet did not crash with so many users of its network during the COVID19 pandemic?

“No,” Cerf replied. “Since 1983, the system has grown 10 million times. Technology has adapted to demand. What we do [today] with video streaming, a few years ago was unthinkable.”

Asked if the internet will “return to normality” since the pandemic has eased, Cerf said, “The first thing I imagine is that internet access will increase even more, because everyone has understood its importance. I am thinking of remote working, remote teaching, and of medical examinations. The second is that there will be an increasing involvement of space agencies to build an internet that brings the connection everywhere.”

When asked what should happen after we reach 5 billion users on the internet, Cerf responded, “We have to close the gap with others, bringing the connection everywhere. It is already happening, with satellite and with 5G, but the matter will become economic. Not everyone will be able to afford it. And then there is a functional gap regarding the language, which finds information or people with motor, sight, and hearing disorders who struggle with applications not designed for them, as well. We must work to ensure that no one is excluded.”

What are Cerf’s thoughts about the future of the internet?

“The future is built by those who are dissatisfied, we have always evolved because someone is dissatisfied with the way things are. So, I invite everyone to be a little dissatisfied,” Cerf surmised.

“A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication,” a paper published in May 1974, by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, is located on the Princeton University website and can be read here: https://bit.ly/3xv1syZ.

(Right-to-Use image fee paid)

The stone pillars of social media

© Mark Ollig

Do you have a favorite social media website?

It was surprising when a new survey published by our friends at Pew Research stated seven out of 10 Americans do not participate in online social media websites.

For those of us who do, the name of this highest-rated social media website by Pew will not surprise too many folks; Facebook.

Facebook dominates the online real estate market with 2.8 billion active users.

In 2004, Facebook’s website URL (Uniform Resource Locator) first appeared on the internet as Thefacebook.com.

Facebook purchased the Facebook.com domain name Aug. 23, 2005, for a reported $200,000, and switched to it.

Facebook owns 78 companies, including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram social media platforms.

They also control company ownership in software marketing, search engines, language processing, virtual reality, mobile commerce, tracking/monitoring applications – you get the idea, they possess a lot.

I have been a registered and active user on Facebook since Jan. 31, 2009.

Some folks do not look at Facebook in a positive light, and I can understand it.

The Facebook political forums can, and do get very heated. So, I instead choose to participate in groups such as Fans of Laurel and Hardy, Apollo Spacecraft History, 1970s Memories, Boxing Knowledge, Vintage Ads, and of course, Star Trek The Original Series.

Friends of the Luce Line West is another Facebook group that posts photos and information about the 63-mile-long Luce Line hiking, biking, equestrian, and snowmobiling trail.

The main reason I stay on Facebook is that it provides an effortless way to share videos and photos, and communicate with many of my siblings, kids, relatives, and friends who are also members.

In a way, the “virtual community” nostalgia from the pre-web days still lives on through our participation in social media websites.

YouTube, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, makes up the other online social media pillar with 2.3 billion users.

The first video was uploaded to YouTube April 23, 2005. It was “Me at the Zoo,” by YouTube co-founder Karim.

Karim filmed his 19-second video at the San Diego Zoo in front of a corral containing a few elephants.

“All right, so here we are in front of the elephants. The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really, long trunks, and that’s cool. And that’s pretty much all there is to say,” commented the 25-year-old Karim during the video.

As of this writing, Karim’s “Me at the Zoo” video has received 171.5 million views and 11 million comments.

In November 2006, Karim, Hurley, and Chen sold their interests in YouTube.

Those making offers included Yahoo! Inc., Microsoft, and Google.

YouTube accepted the final offer from Google.

The Denny’s restaurant, near YouTube’s headquarters above a pizza and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, CA, is where the Google and YouTube folks signed the deal while sitting in a booth.

Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion Nov. 13, 2006, which today would be around $2.2 billion.

YouTube is now estimated to be worth $170 billion, which is a pretty good return on Google’s initial purchase price.

At the time of the YouTube acquisition, Google operated an online video service at videogoogle.com. This website went online three weeks before YouTube was founded.

Google shut down video.google.com Aug. 20, 2012.

Each day, YouTube receives 720,000 hours’ worth of video uploads, and people watch an estimated five billion videos.

Google has a market cap (capitalization) value of $1.65 trillion.

In June, Facebook joined the trillion-dollar club as its market cap value reached $1.06 trillion.

Amazon has a reported market capitalization value of $1.68 trillion.

And yes, there are technology companies with a market cap of over $2 trillion.

Apple Inc. reached a value cap of $2.1 trillion July 31, 2020, and this month, Microsoft’s market cap value will also be $2.1 trillion.

Twitter receives a lot of publicity. Therefore, one would think it would rank right up there with the other two social media pillars; however, it currently has just under 200 million active users worldwide.

In case you were wondering, Twitter has a market cap of $55.2 billion.

Facebook and YouTube are today’s social media stone pillars and will probably remain so into the foreseeable future.

Original Facebook [thefacebook] website page
from February 12, 2004

YouTube webpage from August 01, 2005

YouTube webpage from April 28, 2005

Twitter from July 8, 2011

Twitter from Dec. 30, 2006

Twitter from Jan. 1, 2010

Tesla: Smartphone predictions and more

© Mark Ollig

The night of July 10, 1856, the loud rumblings of a thunderstorm and the crackling of lightning bolts lit up the sky above a house located in the village of Smiljan, situated in the mountainous region of Western Lika, now a part of Croatia.

Inside the house, just as Georgina “Djuka” Tesla (née Mandic) began delivering her baby, another bright lightning bolt crackled across the sky.

The baby was named Nikola.

Nikola’s father, Milutin Tesla, spoke several languages, wrote poetry and political commentary, and eventually became an Orthodox priest.

“Tesla” is an original surname of Slavic Origin, meaning “harvester.”

Jan. 30, 1926, journalist John B. Kennedy interviewed the now-famous 69-year-old electrical researcher, inventor, and philosopher, Nikola Tesla, for an article in Collier’s magazine.

Kennedy described Tesla as “a tall, slender man, an ascetic figure dressed in sober clothes, and observing his interlocutor with a firm, deep look.”

His interview included some amazing future predictions by Nikola Tesla – including one for the smartphone.

During this 1926 interview, Tesla described future wireless communication as a means for allowing people “to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance, with the clarity of a face-to-face meeting using a device that will fit in our vest pockets.”

Well, there we have it. Nikola Tesla perfectly described wireless telecommunications using a smartphone 95 years ago.

Looking back from today, we know Nikola Tesla had an exceptional ability to predict future trends from a technological standpoint accurately.

One of the statements in the 1926 interview which stands out for me is when Tesla said, “There is a clear difference between progress and technology. Progress provides benefits to humanity, technology not necessarily.”

In the Collier’s magazine article, Kennedy describes Tesla as “An almost monastic life that of the engineer-philosopher-inventor: he does not drink, does not smoke, follows a feral diet. Totally focused on his mission: discover and create.”

Nikola Tesla personally held 112 registered US Patents and was the creative force behind an estimated 700 US Patents.

A complete list of Tesla’s 112 US Patents is at https://bit.ly/2SxPZiQ.

Feb. 6, 1894, Tesla received US Patent 514,168, titled “Means for Generating Electric Currents.” View it at https://bit.ly/3vWWA3X.

Nov. 8, 1898, Tesla acquired US Patent 613,809 for a radio-controlled boat: https://bit.ly/2URiWHz.

Our modern lives are defined by and dependent upon our ability to reliably harness the flow of electricity to power the many devices we use daily.

Today, we can recharge our smartphones without being directly plugged into a physically wired electrical source; we place the smartphone onto a wireless charging base pad. Our smartphone’s battery is charged through the air – wirelessly.

We should not be too surprised to learn Nikola Tesla patented a method to transmit electrical energy through the air 116 years ago.

April 18, 1905, Nikola Tesla received US Patent 787,412, titled “Art of Transmitting Electrical Energy Through the Natural Mediums.” See this patent at https://bit.ly/35UWi2X.

From the mid-1890s through 1906, Tesla proposed, obtained funding, and built a facility to house his “World Wireless System.”

This system would wirelessly transmit and deliver the signals of radio, telephone, facsimile images, and electrical energy to devices around the world, using the Earth itself as a conducting medium to overcome line-of-sight distance limitations.

Tesla was attempting to create a worldwide wireless communications and power delivery system from a 185-foot-tall radio tower known as the Wardenclyffe Tower, built by Tesla on Long Island in New York.

“Earth’s electrical charge can be disturbed, and thereby electrical waves can be efficiently transmitted to any distance without the use of cables or wires,” Tesla stated in 1895.

Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower never obtained its intended fruition, and sadly, in 1917, the metal tower was demolished for scrap in an attempt to repay Tesla’s mounting debts. Some say the US Government destroyed it to keep it from being used by German spies – whatever the case, Tesla’s vision for sending wireless communications and electrical energy around the world had ended.

By 1922, the remains of Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower and its property were taken away by foreclosure.

Jan. 7, 1943, at his residence in room 3327 at the New Yorker Hotel, New York, NY, Nikola Tesla died at age 86.

Before Tesla died, he spoke of his completed research on “particle beam weaponry,” or what could be considered a laser beam. Tesla called it a “death beam.”

It was reported two days after Tesla’s death, the FBI and other US government agencies removed his files and research notes to check whether their contents contained any national security risks.

Other sources also reported that Tesla’s research papers on his particle beam weaponry went to Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, OH, for evaluation and experimentation.

The results of any experiments or evaluation of Tesla’s particle beam weaponry research under an operation reportedly code-named “Project Nick” were never made public.

This year, The US Navy will deploy a 60-kilowatt laser weapon called High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical-dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) aboard the Burke-class destroyer USS Preble.

In April 1927, Nikola Tesla said, “Let the future tell the truth and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.”

There is so much more to know about Nikola Tesla. A reliable source to start with is the Nikola Tesla Memorial Center, located in Smiljan, Croatia. Its website is https://mcnikolatesla.hr/en.

THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER 
JAN. 26,1926, TUESDAY  •  PAGE 1

Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower and factory plant on Long Island, NY (1902)

Nikola Tesla statue in front of the rebuilt home on the location where he was born

Star Tribune Minneapolis, Minnesota
Jan. 08, 1943, Friday   •  Page 5