Free Twitter Wit: Brilliance in 140 Characters Or Less by Nick Douglas

FOREWORD
    It’s easy to assign less weight to a pun than a poem—after all, laughter lightens the load. However, the significance of humor as a delivery mechanism for important information should not be underestimated. Satirist Stephen Colbert called Twitter “the answer to the question you didn’t know you had until you had the answer.” In poking fun at this new form of communication, Mr. Colbert highlighted the very essence of innovation; breakthroughs like Twitter often occur by happy accident.
    In the past decade, something interesting has been happening. People have been moving their electronic communication from closed systems like e-mail to open systems like social networks. There’s more value in messages shared publicly because more opportunities arise. A kind of social alchemy takes place when a seemingly valueless message finds its way to someone for whom it strikes a chord. Lead can be turned into gold on an open communication network.
    Simple, rudimentary exchanges of information between individuals in real time enables a flock of birds to move around an object in flight as if they were one organism. Speed and simplicity work together to create something of beauty. There are over a billion Internet users on this planet but there are four billion people with access to mobile texting. Twitter blends these networks with speed and simplicity and opens the combination todevelopment. That means more opportunities for beauty—and well-timed zingers.
    The first weekend we began experimenting with the concept of Twitter, I was tearing carpeting from the floor of my home in Berkeley, California. It was a hot day and my back was aching. My phone buzzed in my pocket. It was a tweet by my friend and long-time collaborator Evan Williams: “Sipping pinot noir in Sonoma after a massage.” The striking difference between our two activities in that moment made me laugh out loud. When I realized our experiment was making me laugh, I knew it had potential.
    We’ve seen people use Twitter to help each other during disasters, to break incredible news, to raise money for charities halfway around the world, to organize protests, to fight injustice, and simply to have fun. Through it all, there has been quickness, grace, simplicity, and humor—there has been wit. No matter how sophisticated the system becomes, it will never be about algorithms and machines. Wit is a powerful reminder that Twitter is not about the triumph of technology; it’s about the triumph of humanity.
    However, Oscar Wilde famously wrote, “It is a curious fact that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves seriously.” As powerful as this system has the potential to be, we’d be nowhere without a good dose of funny. Humor makes life worth the effort. If everyone were serious all the time, I’m pretty sure we’d never get any work done. We’re hiring pretty aggressively at our company these days, and key factors we look for are a good sense of humor and an active Twitter account.
    Some of my favorite tweets are those that make me laugh all over again each time I revisit them. My friend Philip is an incredibly brilliant person. He’s a musically and mathematically gifted serial entrepreneur with a goofy laugh and an impressive array of idiosyncrasies. He’s also very tall and quintessentially geeky. In the middle of the night he Twittered, “Taking a bath. Come over if you want to learn about water displacement.” It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he was prepared to discuss fluid mechanics with anyone who responded.
    Wit is a wonderful word to associate with something that may turn out to be a favorable mutation in the evolution of human communication. Sharp, quick, inventive, and intelligent, with a natural aptitude for words, ideas, and humor: The very definition of wit brings to mind the people with whom I share my days. The heart of Twitter is the small team of folks working out of a loft in San Francisco, but our soul is