"Twitter" Has Changed a Lot Since the 1700s

Nowadays, we use words like "twitter" all the time to talk about our everyday social meda-ing. In the 1800s, they said "twitter" too, but it meant something a little different. So did "pin." The times, they have a-changed.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, which tracks trends like this over time, "twitter" wasn't quite the same word it is today, but the relation is pretty obvious.

twitter
-One who twits; dial. a tale-bearer.
1854: "Don't tell him anything, he's a twitter."

-A condition of twittering or tremulous excitement (from eager desire, fear, etc.); a state of agitation; a flutter, a tremble. Now chiefly dial.
1869: "[She] was in a twitter, partly of expectation, and partly..of fear."

-A suppressed laugh, a titter; a fit of laughter. dial.
1736: "He is in a mighty twitter."

-An act or the action of twittering, as a bird; light tremulous chirping. Also transf. a sound resembling this.
1871: "A mere swallow-twitter of inarticulate jargon."

"Pin" on the other hand, as explained by John Camden Hotten's 1874 The Slang Dictionary, meant something completely different. At least as slang.

"to put in the pin," to refrain from drinking. From the ancient peg tankard, which was furnished with a row of pins, or pegs, to regulate the amount which each person was to drink. Drunken people are often requested to "put in the pin," from some remote connexion between their unsteadiness and that of a carriage wheel which has lost its linch-pin. The popular cry, "put in the pin," can have no connexion with the drinking pin or peg now, whatever it may originally have had. A merry pin, a roysterer

Of course, plenty of other words have changed as well, with many just picking up verb functionality, like "friend" and "favorite." Still others, like "search," mean the same basic thing, in a completely different context. Who knows what words might get bastardized by social media next, but with any luck someday you'll be able regale your grandchildren with tales of when "sexts" were something exciting. [h/t Boing Boing]

Image by Mariusz Szczygiel/Shutterstock

Crashlytics Makes Enterprise Features Free for All

Crashlytics, the mobile crash-reporting and analysis platform that was acquired by Twitter last month, said today that it will make its enterprise-level features available for free. In a company blog post, the company’s co-founder, Wayne Chang, said, “The features and usage we used to charge for based on limits are now unlimited across the board.”

Twitter Now Reportedly Valued at $9 Billion

Twitter now holds a $9 billion valuation after investment firm BlackRock made an $80 million offer to purchase stock from early Twitter employees, the Financial Times reported on Friday. The new $9 billion number is a 10 percent valuation increase since the company last raised money in 2011, yet lower than the $10 billion and $11 billion valuations made last year after two secondary stock transactions. Twitter declined to comment on the report.

How IBM Is Watching How You Shop Online

Starting yesterday and continuing into today, computing giant IBM has been putting out quick reports on the state of online shopping.

Apparently this is now a officially a thing, so here are some stats taken from the latest snapshot as of 3 pm ET, because we just know you’re not shopping on a tablet, you’re on the edge of your seat waiting to hear about how many others are:

• Online sales are up 20 percent for this same time period over Black Friday 2011.
  
  
• The number of consumers using a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site is at 28 percent, up from 18.1 percent in 2011.
  
• The number of consumers using their mobile device to make a purchase is 14.3 percent, up from 10.3 percent in 2011.
  
• Shoppers using the iPad led to more retail purchases more often per visit than other mobile devices, with conversion rates reaching 4.2 percent, higher than all other mobile devices.
  
• Shoppers referred from social networks like Facebook and Twitter generated 0.18 percent of all online sales on Black Friday.

So you might be wondering how IBM gets all this info. It’s all part of its strategic play in the world of big data, essentially helping companies make more sense of the huge troves of data they’ve gathered that were previously being ignored. Smarter Commerce is the area of IBM devoted to helping retailers better understand that data so they can come up with improved ideas concerning how to sell more stuff.

Where they gather that data is the IBM Benchmark. It’s a cloud-based digital analytics platform that soaks up digital information about how consumers respond to different ways of selling things online, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year long, from 500 different online retailers. IBM won’t name them — they joined the network under condition of anonymity — but Big Blue says the companies that participate include about half of the companies named on the Internet Retailer Top 100 list. A lot of the technology comes from Coremetrics and Unica, acquisitions IBM made in 2010.

Last year, I talked about all this with Craig Hayman, IBM’s VP of the WebSphere, Application and Integration Middleware Software Division of the IBM Software Group. One quote from that conversation sticks out in my memory; it bears repeating here:

“If you think about consumers, and you think about the amount of technology that they have at their hands, to reach out to read reviews and talk to friends and families, they're incredibly empowered. There's not one purchase decision that they make that is not impacted by some element of social networks. What does that do to the companies that have to deal with that by offering the best products and services, and you see companies are struggling to do that: To make the right offer at the right time with the right price. When they do it well, we all talk about how it went well; and when they do it badly, we talk about how annoying it was.”

So now you know. Not only are retailers and your credit card companies watching you shop, so is IBM.