Everyone in the world of Twitter is learning tonight that the worlds richest geek is now on Twitter.
@BillGates tweeted his first tweet at about noon (Pacific Standard Time) and used just over half of his 140 character limit:
I find it quite on the mark that he started his first tweet with “Hello World”. I mean he is a computer geek and programmer at heart.
From the Wikipedia Hello World Program entry:
A "Hello World" program is a computer program which prints out "Hello, world!" on a display device. It is used in many introductory tutorials for teaching a programming language. Such a program is typically one of the simplest programs possible in most computer languages. It is often considered to be tradition among programmers for people attempting to learn a new programming language to write a "Hello World!" program as one of the first steps of learning that particular language. Some are surprisingly complex, especially in some graphical user interface (GUI) contexts, but most are very simple, especially those which rely heavily on a particular command line interpreter ("shell") to perform the actual output. In an embedded system, the text may be sent to a liquid crystal display (LCD), or the message may be substituted by some other appropriate signal, such as an LED being turned on.
Just goes to prove that the dry sense of humor he showed during keynote videos/addresses over the years and in those Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld commercials was no fluke!
He has already connected with the most followed person on Twitter as well, @aplusk, and making those kind of connections will be positive for his foundation and the philanthropic work he does.
Welcome to the World of Twitter @BillGates
