Lost Signals

Twitter is (or was, depending on when you read this) an online social network that launched on July 15, 2006. The initial concept was to provide a way for users to keep their friends and fans updated on what they were doing by sending a text message to a specific number after registering theirs with the service; the contents of the message would then appear on the Twitter website. Posts were restricted to 140 characters at first due to the limitations of text messaging at the time, a constraint that was novel enough that the site’s popularity skyrocketed within the first year of its creation and only continued to grow, both in terms of user base and functionality. Despite the fact that there were over 1.3 billion registered accounts as of December 2022, statistics show that less than 20% of them were actively using them. What happened to the people who created and abandoned all those accounts? What were their last messages to the world? Lost Signals started as a blog project that ran from September 2014 to June 2017 and documented those final words of Twitter accounts that had long since gone dormant, usually after posting only a few times. This book is a memorial to the fallen and forgotten.