Retro – 2009, Twitter’s defining moment

I came across the movie Sully with Tom Hanks.
I have been avoiding watching it as I used to travel a lot (before COVID) and did not want the visuals of an airplane in distress in my head as I traveled. I learned from watching Jaws as a kid that I still fear shadows in the water as an adult. With the pandemic, my traveling time is down to zero, so I went ahead and watched it.

It reminded me a lot of Twitter's defining moment on 15 Jan 2009, 12 years ago.
The news of the plane crash in the Hudson River came from a user, not from a TV channel. The user is a regular user like you and me, casual clothes during the process of heading to the landing site, saw people who needed help, and shared the process.

That picture was shared on the global TV channels long before those channels did anything related to Social Media. Now they have Social Media segments, but at the time, they did not know what social media is, and if they did, they did not consider it to be reliable sources. Twitter was purely text-based at the time! Images were not part of it. To upload images to it, we used to use an external service, like TwitPic, where we upload the image to the third-party service, and the third-party service would then give us a link to paste in the text of Twitter.

I miss you, Twitter 1.0
I love retro tech.