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Twitter and "Face Book" Are Older Than the Internet

by Terrence O'Brien on May 4, 2009 at 08:34 AM


Well, it turns out all these fancy social networking tools we've grown to love so much aren't really all that new. Thanks to projects that have been digitizing newspaper archives, researchers have turned up references to "Face Book" and "Twitter" several decades before the Internet was even a glint in a military scientist's eye.

An article from the August 24, 1902 edition of the Boston Daily Globe titled, "Face Book The New Fad," describes a party game in which participants draw caricatures of each other. And a 1942 Washington Post article, titled "Think Before You Twitter," was all about proper etiquette for small talk.

And it's not just Web site names that have been circulating forever. William Steig, a children's book author, was writing stories in what many would recognize as IM and Twitter shorthand back in 1962 (Using "I M 2" instead of "I am too"). There is even a transcription of a speech by Abraham Lincoln that appears to contain an emoticon.

Turns out there really is nothing new in the world. [From: NY Times, Business Insider, and Design Observer]

Tags: emoticons, facebook, im, newspaper, retrotech, top, twitter

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