Twitter in 1935??

I seem to have developed some sort of gleeful antipathy to Twitter. A sort of ‘love to hate’ relationship. Well here’s the latest spoils of StumbleUpon. It brought up this little blog post on a 1935 version of a messaging system. It’s a sort of vending machine-looking piece of communication apparatus to be put up on street corners or popular meeting places. The ‘meeter’ can scribble a message on a band of paper, pop in a coin, and the message will then be prominently displayed in the machine’s window for the ‘meetee’ to find. I.e. “Sorry matey, you were 10 minutes late and I have more important things to do than stand around in the rain waitning for you.” Matey then turns up, to find that he’s missed you by exactly 2 and a half minutes.

Yes, granted, it makes even less sense than Twitter, since you can be pretty sure that the right person is definitely not going to see your message (at least until the point where these messaging machines become so well integrated into the meeting-culture that you would actually expect people to look at them). But still, a wry smile of satisfaction from me over yet another piece of Twitter mockery.