Queen Elizabeth II's first tweet triggers royal finger questions
When it comes to old-school meeting new-school, the Queen of England taking to Twitter for the first time is probably as odd as it gets. Queen Elizabeth II didn't get to send her first tweet in the privacy of her bedroom like many of us, either; instead, the message posted to the official @BritishMonarchy account was sent out by the Queen from the Science Museum in London, UK, to mark the opening of the new Information Age exhibition there. Only problem is, there's already some controversy about whether the Monarch actually did send out the tweet.
In the photos of the Queen tweeting from a lectern at the museum, she's seen tapping an iPad to send out the message. Now, it's clearly pre-written – it's unclear how fast Her Majesty is at pecking at the iOS on-screen keyboard – but prompting questions is what device, exactly, was recorded as posting it on Twitter itself.
According to TweetDeck, which shows what client was involved not just the message itself, the Queen's tweet came from an iPhone, not an iPad.
It is a pleasure to open the Information Age exhibition today at the @ScienceMuseum and I hope people will enjoy visiting. Elizabeth R.
— BritishMonarchy (@BritishMonarchy) October 24, 2014
Swift to not only clamp down on speculation but spawn a new word in the process, a spokesperson for the palace refused to go into the details.
"We're not going to get into the processology of this," the representative told press.
It wouldn't be the first time that some basic Twitter investigating has got a celebrity into trouble, though usually it's been around celebrity spokespeople for non-iPhone brands caught caught sending out social updates from their iOS smartphone anyway. Alicia Keys memorably blamed a hacker for tweeting from an iPhone during her curtailed tenure as BlackBerry ambassador in 2013.
As for the exhibition itself, that spans over 200 years of communication and information technology history. Divided into six zones – representing six phases of IT, through cable, telephone exchange, broadcast, constellation, cell, and web – it kicks off in the 19th Century and moves all the way up to today's pervasive internet.
SOURCE The Science Museum
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IMAGE @BritishMonarchy