The Web's Creator Tweets

He's as important a pioneer as Johannes Gutenberg or Alexander Graham Bell -- except that he's alive, well, and very much deeply involved in determining the future of the medium he created. He's Sir Tim Berners Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, and it was an honor to sit in the same ballroom as the guy yesterday as he appeared onstage as the final guest at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. (The unassuming Berners-Lee, a British subject, was knighted by the queen five years ago for his contribution to science.)

As TechCrunch's Robin Wauters noted, Sir Tim has joined Twitter -- here's his account -- and started tweeting shortly before his Web.20 session began, Like nearly every new Twitter user, he started out by being somewhat confused, as he noted in his first tweet.

Judging from Sir Tim's third tweet, he's already a user of the Twitter-like Identi.ca service-which makes sense, since (unlike Twitter) it's an open-source project and therefore reflective of his dedication to openness on the Web.

Side note: Twitter's recent introduction of a spam reporting feature is a boon, but there's something jarring about the "report timberners_lee for spam" link at the right of his page. It's a little as if George Washington suddenly showed up at the White House today, wanted to stop in for a visit, and was forced to walk through a metal detector . . .