Nicholas Carr: Woodrow Wilson was the First Twitterer

[Carr is a former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review and has written for the New York Times, the Financial Times, Wired, and many other publications. He is also a member of Britannica's Editorial Board of Advisors. He blogs at www.roughtype.com.]

Twitterification continues. Not only are other social networking sites, such as Facebook, scrambling to pour their members’ energy into the realtime stream, but more traditional publishers are also adopting the Twitter model to firehose their content. Build your arks, my friends: The stream is going mainstream.

Recently it was the New York Times that took the realtime plunge with the launch of Times Wire, a jittery twittery service that the paper describes as “a continuously updated stream of the latest stories and blog posts.” The news scroll updates every minute, as fresh stories flicker into consciousness and old ones flicker out. Times Wire doesn’t just give the Gray Lady a facelift; it jabs an IV into the ashen flesh of her forearm and hooks her up to a Red Bull drip bag. It’s Times Wired.

This isn’t the first appearance of Times Wire. The original was installed next to the death bed of former president Woodrow Wilson on February 1, 1924, as the Times reported in a story headlined “Times Wire Near Bedside”:

Special facilities to transmit the news from former President Wilson’s bedside were installed by The New York Times early this evening. A telephone wire was connected with The Times Washington Bureau in the Albee Building and temporary headquarters half a block from the Wilson home in S Street. A Morse instrument was attached to this wire and every change in Mr. Wilson’s condition was instantly flashed to the Washington Bureau and then transmitted over leased wires to the New York office of The Times, giving the most expeditious service.

That’s right: Woodrow Wilson, though he surely didn’t realize it at the time, was the world’s first Twitterer.