Twitter turns 8 years.
Yes some of you guys favorite social network Twitter is now 8 years old. Who would have thought something started so simple would be something this big.
Although twitter has been here for 8 years it is still something new to most sri lankans. Even I joined twitter 5 years back (that account is not there anymore) and even then there were very few sri lankans. Since then Twitter has grown to something that’s like a small sub culture in Sri Lanka, with yearly gatherings of sri lankan twitter users.
Twitter back then has been something completely different to twitter that we see today. It was SMS based, no timelines, no way to follow people and all the tweets by everyone appeared as a single stream of tweets (posts) and no @replies.
It was not even called Twitter back then, it was called Twttr.
Most people who love Twitter today wouldn’t have joined back then, and the original idea was so simple people would have set it up within few weeks, it kept on adding new stuff beating competitors like Status and Identica to come to the global phenomenon that it has become today. And I think we will see so many good changes on Twitter in future as well.
The most difficult thing Twitter has yet to figure out is a way to make money from the huge number of users. They’ve tried daily deals, sponsored tweets, sponsored accounts but still haven’t found a clear way of making money.
Twitter has helped me to find some really good friends that I might have not found otherwise, like @ipv10, @saptha and many more that I might have not met otherwise on Facebook or any other place. There are also sociopaths, stalkers, people who act like know it alls, and some people trying to overthrow the government online.
And twitter for me is personally a great place where I keep in touch with latest happenings and news. However sometimes it can be pretty daunting. Sometimes the heavy tweeters, and some personalities makes so much noise it makes me feel quit twitter or feel like “why tweet and add more noise to already noisy place?”, so sometimes I just drop off the radar and comes back days or after weeks.
Well although still at the end of the day I feel that no one on Twitter cares about you/me and we’re left with only ourselves, aren’t we not?
at the end of the day you have only you
— anji (@anjiX_) March 16, 2014