Twitter began first and foremost as an SMS-based social network in the pre-smartphone era. Everything was done by text message, including signup IIRC. In the US I think the phone number was 40404. Twitter’s longstanding 140-character limit was a direct result of wanting to make sure tweets could fit into SMS’s limit of 160 characters and still have room for extra data like the username.

I remember going on a family vacation to central Oregon and having no cell signal for several days. When I got back to a connection my phone became unusable for almost half-an-hour because I was constantly receiving text messages from Twitter that had failed to deliver while I was out of reach.

Facebook actually had methods to post from SMS (and email) in those early days but the SMS functionality was limited to certain (mostly national) carriers and back then there were a lot more regional carriers and I was never able to try the SMS service.

I don’t know if MySpace offered anything like that; I never had an account. Back then it was the public social network. Facebook was seen as more private because only your friends could see your posts and it was only open to college students (only at certain universities that had been configured in the software).

It was a brave new world back then that seemed to herald a bright new future, even better than when we’d been using AIM and MSN Messenger.

You used to be able to tweet by texting a number via SMS too.