Twitter's birthday was yesterday, March 21st, which means the site is eight years old now, assuming you count from Jack Dorsey's "just setting up my twttr" post back in 2006. Eight years is a weird stretch for a website. Not old enough to feel like a fossil, but old enough that most of the fun early stuff has been buried under nine hundred replies and screenshots nobody asked for.
I got curious and went digging for my own first tweet last night instead of doing literally anything else I was supposed to be doing. Took me a good twenty minutes of scrolling because I joined back when Twitter's search only went back so far and there's no clean "jump to year one" button anywhere, which seems like an oversight for a company that's already gone through this many redesigns. Found it eventually though. Something dumb about a wifi router not connecting, posted from a BlackBerry, at 11:47pm on a Tuesday. Riveting stuff. I dont think I posted again for almost three weeks after that.
What gets me is how differently the site behaves now compared to then. Back in the early days it really was just "what are you doing," full stop, the way the little box used to literally say. Now its link-sharing and arguments and brands doing bits and, more and more, ads slotted in that look almost but not quite like real tweets. I dont hate the promoted tweets thing as much as some people do, mostly because Ive gotten very good at scrolling past them without registering what they say, but its a different animal than the app I downloaded back in 2008.
The thing thats actually kept me on Twitter this long isnt the timeline, its the DMs and the lists. I keep a private list of maybe fifteen people whose tweets I actually want to see in order, and I basically ignore my main feed except to check notifications. Thats probably not how the product is meant to be used, but its the only way Ive found to keep it from turning into a firehose that eats my whole evening.
One thing Ill say, and this is apparently an unpopular opinion based on comment threads Ive read elsewhere: I think 140 characters is close to perfect and I hope they never touch it. Every time theres a rumor floating around that theyre going to loosen the limit, my stomach drops a little. The constraint is the whole point of the thing. Take it away and you just get Facebook with worse formatting and more typos.
(Small tangent, sorry: can we also talk about how bad Twitter's own mobile site still is compared to Tweetbot? I know Im not supposed to care about third-party clients anymore given how that relationship has been going, but Tweetbot on my phone is genuinely a better piece of software than the thing Twitter built themselves, and thats a strange position for a company to be in with its own product.)
Eight years, for context, is older than the iPad. Older than Instagram by two years. Older than most of the apps currently sitting on your home screen, probably. Its strange to think there are people out there who've never used the internet without Twitter existing somewhere in it. I remember trying to explain the concept to my mother around 2009 and her asking, reasonably enough, why anyone would want to tell four people what they had for lunch. I still dont have a great answer for that, except that somewhere along the way it stopped being about lunch and started being the place breaking news shows up nine times out of ten before it shows up anywhere else. That part I did not see coming when I signed up.
If youve still got an old account lying around somewhere, its worth the twenty minutes to go dig up your first tweet. Half of finding mine was cringing at it, but the other half was kind of nice, actually, like finding a ticket stub in an old coat pocket you forgot you were wearing. Just dont expect the app to make it easy for you to go looking. It really should, eight years in.