Twitter turned eight this past Friday. March 21st, if you want the exact date, that's the day back in 2006 when Jack Dorsey sent the first tweet, something like "just setting up my twttr," which still cracks me up every time I think about it. Eight years. I signed up in 2008, so I've been on this thing for six of those eight years, which is somehow both a long time and not very long at all when I think about how much has actually changed.
I didn't do anything to mark the occasion. No cake emoji, no retrospective thread (do people even do "threads" yet, or is that just me replying to my own tweets six times in a row because I have too many thoughts for 140 characters). But it got me thinking about how differently I use the thing now compared to 2008, and mostly what I landed on is: I still don't fully understand favoriting.
Here's my problem with the little star. Back when I started, favoriting a tweet meant something close to bookmarking it: you'd star something you wanted to find again later, like a good link or a joke you wanted to remember. Now half the time I star something I just mean "I saw this and I acknowledge you." It's a nod. A digital head-tilt. But the interface hasn't caught up to that shift at all, it's still presented like you're curating a little museum of your favorite tweets, and mine is a graveyard of half-intentions and stuff I meant to go back and read properly and never did. I hit the star by accident constantly too, especially on my phone, where my thumb is apparently just slightly too big for whatever hit target Twitter decided on for iOS. Not a huge complaint in the scheme of things. Just one of those little frictions that never gets fixed because nobody at Twitter has to live with my thumbs.
Anyway. Eight years of a company that only went public a few months ago is a strange milestone to sit with. The stock's been all over the place since November (up near seventy at one point), and from what I can tell watching the ticker like a nosy neighbor, momentum names like this have had a genuinely rough few weeks lately as the froth comes off a lot of the high-flying internet and biotech stuff. I don't own any of it and I'm not going to pretend I have some sharp take on whether it's overvalued. I just find it funny that a service I signed up for on a whim in college, mostly to see what all the SXSW fuss was about, is now a thing people argue about in earnings calls.
Small tangent, because it's been eating my evenings: I finally caved and bought Titanfall two weekends ago. Everyone's been talking about it since it came out on the 11th and I held off because I don't own an Xbox One and wasn't thrilled about building a new PC just for one game, but I did it anyway and I don't regret it. The mech stuff is fun but honestly what's got me hooked is the wall-running: moving around those maps feels different from anything I've played in years, like the traversal itself is the actual game and the shooting is almost secondary. No campaign to speak of really, which some people are annoyed about, but I'm okay with it. Not every game needs a story mode bolted on. I'd rather have thirteen really good maps than one mediocre single-player campaign nobody finishes.
Also updated to iOS 7.1 a couple weeks back and I keep noticing small things — nothing major, just little polish, the kind of update where you can't point to one headline feature but everything feels slightly less broken than it did. That's mostly what iOS 7 has needed since it launched, honestly. Less reinvention, more sanding down the rough edges.
Eight years of Twitter, one weird stock, one very good mech game, and a phone update I barely noticed until I did. That's about where my head's at this week. Back to actual work now — I've got a client site that's been sitting half-migrated for three days and it's not going to migrate itself, unfortunately.