Mission Mission

Guys. I was reading the excerpt from Nick Bilton’s forthcoming book about how Twitter was started in The New York Times and I realized something. I might have invented Twitter. I mean, I know I didn’t, but look at these pages that I blogged about a few years ago, it’s almost eerie. I explained my process in my previous post:

A long time ago in this very land (sometime in 2003) I sat alone in my living room, looking out the window onto Guerrero Street and wondered how I could connect with the people of the neighborhood, hear their thoughts, start a dialogue, without having to actually leave my house and face people in real life. Yes, it sounds sad and lonely. Whatever. The point is, I didn’t know about hyperlocal blogs or anything, so I made do with what I had. Which, apparently, wasn’t much. I figured I’d have to do some fishing.

One morning I tied a piece of paper onto a length of fishing line, attached a pen at the end and lowered them both out the window. I left my house for the day and when I came home that night I reeled the paper in (pen gone).

GOOD MORNING. (if evening, please reverse)

GOOD EVENING (if morning please reverse)

I mean, the bland prompt, time stamp, emoticons, timeline, it’s kinda weird. Before you jump all over me and explain why I didn’t invent Twitter or even Facebook, I know. But, maybe it demonstrates why something like that was ready to take off, that we were all ready to begin communicating in this specific manner. I guess I won’t sue. It’s not my style. And all I did was hang a piece of paper out the window. I guess I could have tried a little harder.

Reader Fred M. alerts us that there’s a Facebook group for protesting the potential Dolores Park shut-down scheduled for September of 2011.

So just in case parks and recreation starts using Facebook for policy decisions, there’s your chance to be heard. Or maybe you’re just trying to get your groups count to an even 50. In any case:

Contact Park and Rec and ask them not to close the ENTIRE park for the duration of the renovations! Although we understand that there are improvements to be made at Dolores Park, shutting down the entire place for 17+ months just seems punitive. Let’s convince them that they can do it in sections and keep pieces of the park open for Mission residents.

Also, let the record show that KevMo and Uptown Almanac broke the DoPa renovations story which is going uncredited just about everywhere today, not that journalistic integrity is our forte.

This morning on FriendFeed, Facebook Senior Platform Manager Dave Morin came across Mission Mission’s April 1 post Zeitgeist to be Replaced by Borders. His response? “[T]his is pretty sad.” Indeed it is, Dave.

Thanks to Todd Jackson for sharing the post via Google Reader.

Dave Morin on FriendFeed.

Mission Mission on Facebook.

Link.