Two Years on Twitter
Earlier today I wondered aloud on Twitter:
I’m trying to think back to where I first heard of Twitter. Drawing a blank. Can you remember?
This set me on a mission to find my earliest tweets and see if maybe I had mentioned it. Imagine my surprise when I discovered the very first one, almost two years old:
Funkifying the universe.
10:24 PM Jun 13th, 2007 from web
Yes. Of course I was. *Ahem*
Shortly after that I tweeted: “Blogging on Metaversed.com/onder/blog about how stupid Twitter is,” but of course, like I said, that was almost two years ago. It’s still there, and so am I.
Of course, around the same time I was writing articles about how Second Life was doomed too. (It’s also still around, in case you were wondering.) This is part of the reason I stopped blogging professionally, leaving the hype machine and opting instead to actually do something out there through Clever Zebra.
It’s incredible to see how things have changed in that time. Now, I’m not going to go on about how fast it’s all grown since its birth as a side project in March 2006. Here’s the founder to tell you about that if you’re interested:
What’s fascinating to me, though, is the evolution of the professional community surrounding these technologies. Everywhere you look the discussion has become “how do we use this”, rather than “this is stupid, this won’t work”. While there are still bloggers and journalists out there who continue to play “build them up and knock them down,” the long view is becoming the prevailing one.
We remember what happened with Google, YouTube, and even those weird nerds-only things called “websites”. It didn’t really matter how people felt about them, only whether or not there were enough people using them to make it worthwhile. Let the press say what it wanted. The question was, and has always been: is there a large enough user base to make it worth paying attention to?
So that’s industry stuff…
On a personal level though, I’ve been in nostalgia heaven. An old tweet led me to an entry I’d totally forgotten about entitled “Don’t Drink and Blog” with this little gem:
don’t make Dan Hunter tired or you’re banned. I’m pretty sure they’ve already banned turkey and warm milk. You could be next.
Wow, I haven’t even thought about those guys in ages! I was a lot more… ah… “feisty” back then apparently, randomly tweeting bits of fury and joy as they occurred to me without worrying too much about whether or not anyone understood what I was talking about.
By August of 2007, however, things started to come together. I started to really apply Twitter as a tool, with links to articles, comments about events, and things like this little gem:
From the geek meet: “Wild sex orgies in 140 characters or less?”
Liveblogging! Little did I know at the time that this was to become one of Twitter’s most important uses.
Now, you’d think I’d have become a big Twitter guru or something but that just didn’t happen. By the time August of 2008 rolled around all I was using Twitter for was to post the “Song of the Day”. You see, I was still foolish enough to actually worry about what people said. At the time, they said: “Oh Twitter, it’s just a fad.”
Something in August of 2008 must have really hit me about how wrong that was, though, because that was the month I began to really leverage it properly. I also decided that month to be a lot more careful about separating hype from news, and began the Business in Virtual Worlds News Roundup.
I’m at 1,682 updates now which, honestly, is a horrible under-usage for such a long period of time. Twitter plays a role in my daily life not just to update others but to keep an eye on the general trends of the day. In a sense, it’s as critical as my news reader.
Year 3 of my Twitter usage will be far more studied, to be certain! I’ve been pouring through research papers on Twitter, watching what the pros do, and experimenting on my own. I wonder what I’ll say about it in August 2010?
