CoTweet

» see cotweet.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Around 2008 a specific problem appeared in large companies and nobody had built for it yet. A brand now had a Twitter account, several people were expected to answer it, and the only way to do that was to share one password and hope two of them did not reply to the same angry customer at once. Twitter's own site assumed one account belonged to one person. CoTweet was founded in San Francisco that year, on Pier 38, to assume the opposite.

What it shipped was a shared inbox with shift work built into it. Multiple editors could sit in the same account, a mention could be assigned to a named colleague, replies carried a small signature so the public could see which human had answered, and there was a record of who had said what. Whole Foods, McDonald's, Ford and Pepsi were on the client list within a year, along with the San Francisco 311 line, which is the tell: this was infrastructure for institutions rather than a client for enthusiasts.

ExactTarget, an email marketing company out of Indianapolis, announced it was buying CoTweet on 2 March 2010 and set up a social media lab in San Francisco around the team. That was the high point of the name. Everything after it was absorption.

~ the dossier ~

~ the job it invented ~

CoTweet is a decent marker for when talking to strangers on the internet became somebody's actual job description. Before it, a company's presence online was a website and a support address. After it there was a person, paid, sitting in a queue of mentions with a workflow around them, and the vocabulary of that role arrived at the same time as the software: escalation paths and response times.

That job reached Turkey a few years behind, which is why the tool never did. Turkish brands were still figuring out Facebook pages while American ones were arguing about who owned the Twitter handle, and by the time a social media team was a normal thing to have in an Ankara office, the software people bought for it was Hootsuite or something built locally. CoTweet had already been renamed by then.

~ the unraveling ~

The free tier was called CoTweet Standard and it was the reason anyone outside a marketing department knew the name. It was also, from ExactTarget's point of view, a product that produced no revenue and sat in front of an enterprise suite it was supposed to be selling. On 2 February 2012 the users got an email with two weeks' notice, plus a free trial of the paid replacement running to 29 February.

~ the next chapter ~

The paid version became ExactTarget Social Engage, which added Facebook and dropped the joke in the name. Salesforce bought ExactTarget in 2013 for around two and a half billion dollars, and the CoTweet code went into what became the Marketing Cloud. The domain lasted a little longer than the brand did: enterprise.cotweet.com was still serving login artwork into 2014, long after nobody was allowed to call the product CoTweet.

Today cotweet.com resolves to a Salesforce marketing page, several rebrands downstream of the thing that used to live there. There is a second CoTweet in the record now, a Twitter feature from 2022 that let two accounts co-author one post and lasted seven months, and searching for the original mostly returns the feature.

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