While everyone's being nostalgic about what Twitter means to them, I may as well add my two cents.
I didn't give birth to Twitter – that was Jack and Florian. But I was its midwife and adoptive mother; for two months in early 2007, I was the code's sole guardian and caretaker.
I was also the first person to hate Twitter; back when it was SMS-only, I did the math and realized that my immigrant prepaid phone plan would charge me $2000/year to send and receive even a 2006-era number of tweets. 🧵
That's another aspect to this that is so poignant for me, personally. I tried to make Twitter better. I tried to make Twitter the fediverse, back in 2008, and after I failed, I left and tried to make the fediverse a thing without Twitter.
That was not an easy task. For a long time, I truly felt it was my fault, personally, that we failed. The enormity of Twitter became oppressive, because it was so obviously the wrong thing, corrupted from its potential by capital and a lack of imagination.
@blaine THANK YOU for all you did in those early days of Twitter! I joined as a user in 2006 and worked for a voice-over-IP (VoIP) company at the time. We came to see great promise in Twitter as this “connective messaging tissue” between systems and people. With the open APIs (and encouragement of developers) we were wiring up everything into Twitter.
It was awesome! Twitter was this chance to interconnect everything in a new way.
And then.. the pivot to advertising.. 🙁🤯
blaine
Dan York