On Twitter’s tenth Birthday, What I discovered From Rereading My 32,417 Tweets (thus far)

Ten years in the past as of late, Jack Dorsey, the cofounder of a carrier then known as Twttr, despatched the sector’s first (and possibly still most renowned) tweet:

fairly lower than a yr later, I joined Twitter as the 817,268th individual to enroll—which makes me either a late early adopter or an early late adopter. My first tweet was just about the same as these of the 817,267 who preceded me, and numerous others who’ve considering that come on board:

on account that then, I’ve despatched more than 32,000 further tweets. however I didn’t provide so much idea to them as a body of work unless a Twitter rep jogged my memory of the carrier’s impending 10th birthday and supplied to round up some stats about my use of the provider over the last 9 years.

when I started fascinated with my time on Twitter, I downloaded my Twitter archive—a compressed file of tweets and retweets that somebody can request of their profile settings. I’ve long recognized this selection existed but assumed that it dumped out some kind of unformatted file that will be difficult to parse, and of passion primarily to individuals who had been leaving Twitter and needed to take their mental property with them.

wrong! obtain your archive, and what you get, successfully, is a mini-Twitter that runs off your personal laptop. It has a nice interface that lets you browse tweets via month or search for key phrases. if you’ve been on Twitter for any length of time, you must snag yours and take a look.

once I started exploring mine, I just stored going except i’d skimmed throughout what amounted to a journal protecting a fair chunk of my existence, a hundred and forty characters (or fewer) at a time.

top Tweet

First, let’s begin with some of the stats that Twitter provided. My busiest hour for tweeting is around 10 a.m., and i tweet probably the most on Tuesday and Wednesdays, which, if it manner the rest, could point out that I like to tweet at work, but most effective after I’ve tended to more pressing matters on the first day of the workweek and first hour of the workday.

Twitter also confirmed one thing I already knew off the highest of my head: My two most-retweeted items were a photo of Oreo-flavored Oreos and a picture of Batman and Robin managing their time table on a Batcomputer. (moral: individuals on Twitter like silly photography.)

The people I mention most steadily on Twitter, the corporate informed me, embrace my sister, a former coworker, two people whose work I’ve edited, and a fellow alumni of pc World magazine. and then there is @apollo729—the one person on the record who I do not know in another context rather than that i admire chatting with him on Twitter.

alone, I pulled up some numbers with regards to the stuff I tweet about. I’ve mentioned Twitter itself 4,006 tweets, fb 584 occasions, and Google+ a hundred and five instances. I’ve talked about the iPhone 1,a hundred and ten occasions and Android 545 instances. RadioShack? I’ve name-checked it 181 occasions, largely ultimate yr in long jags after I was obsessed with its liquidation.

My most prolific duration on Twitter to date was the first six months of 2015, once I tweeted at a torrid percent (for me) of a normal of 25 gadgets a day. i’m not certain why I had a lot to assert, and my conclusion is that Twitter isn’t about volume, since I benefit from the carrier simply as much presently although i am tweeting at about a third that %.

certainly, eager about all these numbers has mostly told me that stats can not inform you that a lot about why Twitter issues. (which is why people who are fixated on follower and retweet counts don’t have in mind Twitter.)

It was once reading outdated tweets moderately than tallying up figures when it comes to them that advised me one thing about Twitter and my relationship with it. Even my very earliest tweets, once I was once nonetheless determining exactly what it used to be, a lot of them were a) about Twitter, b) misfires, or c) so agonizingly mundane that i’m now not positive why I stricken:

repeatedly, I either gave up on Twitter or forgot about it. Checking my archive, i discovered that in 2007, I tweeted 7 instances in March; on no account in April, could, and June; eleven instances in July; not at all in August, September, and October; 27 times in November, and once in December. In January 2008, I did not tweet in any respect, however in February, something clicked. I tweeted sixty seven instances that month and have by no means stopped given that.

(smartly, rarely. among the factoids Twitter equipped to me was once that the remaining time I went three days with out tweeting used to be from November eight-10, 2013. I occur to needless to say I went on a vacation right after that, so perhaps I was distracted via work closing dates prior to I took off.)

by using mid-2008, I was once tweeting the type of stuff I tweet these days, roughly—musings, little jokes, and notes on my work and private interests—predominantly, however no longer completely involving know-how and associated issues:

speeding off that kind of stuff was once fun then, and continues to be so. however you understand what? the principle cause I settled into an ongoing regimen wasn’t as a result of I received the knack of compressing as a minimum vaguely lucrative objects into 140 characters. It was as a result of Twitter changed into an ongoing dialog involving outdated pals, new associates, and people who i know best by @title and Twitter avatar. The second that came about, Twitter not felt like shouting right into a canyon, and i understood exactly why i would need to use it.

here, i believe, is my first @reply—which took place to be addressed to my colleague Jason Snell, whose desk was a couple of cubicles faraway from mine on the time.

Incoming tweets are so core to Twitter that i am sorry that the downloadable archives don’t embody them. you need to use the service’s tremendous-powerful advanced search to tug up ones you’ve got. It seems like the primary @reply I ever obtained was once from my previous good friend Greg Peverill-Conti, and i believe possibly I either wasn’t paying consideration or failed to understand how you can respond, considering that I didn’t acknowledge it:

quickly after I began chatting with different Twitter customers, i began complementing my snippets of text with photos, reveal pictures, and different imagery—which I had to do in the beginning by way of a third-party service equivalent to TwitPic, considering that Twitter failed to but have the aptitude itself.

here is what could be the primary image I tweeted—a crummy photograph of Al Gore—and the primary display shot:

i am lucky, by way of the best way, that TwitPic, which had a close to-death expertise in 2014, nonetheless exists and has saved the photographs I uploaded to it eons in the past. within the early days of Twitter, i attempted out a lot of picture-webhosting products and services, link shorteners, and other Twitter enhancers. Rummaging thru my archive, I found out that a few of them, similar to Yfrog, later went away and broke my tweets within the course of.

Twitter Time computer

after I bought through revisiting the tweets from the era after I was a clueless Twitter novice, I just saved reading my archive until I reached the current day. Any boilerplate diagnosis of what makes Twitter unique involves the truth that it can be about actual-time communications, which may lead you to think about tweets as having a fleetingly quick shelf existence. however i discovered the experience of reliving my existence on Twitter exhilarating, stunning, and even moving.

A pattern of tweets that imply something to me for one purpose or another—infrequently simply because i’m still tickled with the aid of one thing i found funny or fascinating back then:

(observe: I wrote that once I left pc World, when magazines have been collapsing all around me. but my prediction for my own occupation grew to become out to be wrong, flawed, unsuitable, for the reason that I now write for fast firm and made a stop at Time sooner than that.)

I seem to have began the usage of fb in July 2007, just a few months after my earliest tweets, and have spent copious quantities of time there, too. however i don’t assume i’d to find gorging on my previous fb standing updates and people’ responses to them nearly as profitable. Mark Zuckerberg has been recognized to name the service he created a utility, which is about proper: it’s plumbing for routing standing updates, photographs, and other objects round, and for conserving monitor of how persons are connected to each other. the shape itself has no extra personality than Microsoft word does.

Twitter is totally different. It lays down constraints that have not modified that so much during the last decade—the 140-personality limit, the still-sparse number of gadgets you can append to a tweet. however it then invitations you to improvise in collaboration with others. it can be remarkably expressive—has somebody ever when compared it to jazz?—and no two individuals put the identical thing into it, or get the identical thing out.

that is why reviewing my prior tweets used to be meaningful. it is also why i like studying folks’s tweets, which is how i finished up following more than four,000 of my fellow users. And it’s why i think, even after 9 years, like i’m still learning to make use of the provider—and that, if I preserve at it indefinitely, i’ll uncover new issues that Twitter can do, in a way that has nothing to do with any options it may add in the years yet to come.