social media

My Decade on Twitter

It was exactly a decade ago on this day in 2007 that I published my first ‘tweet’, without the slightest clue as to what I was signing up for except that it was known as a ‘microblogging’ website because it allowed you to publish your thoughts in 140 characters in comparison to a standard blog post. I soon realised, this platform called ‘Twitter’ challenged my creative limits to produce noteworthy but short-lived content in a shorter span of time. It had an informal design set up yet a distinctive personality, but most importantly it brought me closer to like-minded individuals from around the globe. They were known as ‘followers’ whom I ‘followed’ and virtually befriended, some of whom I was lucky to have personally met while in India. Speaking of creativity, an enthused generation of users also developed an inane vocabulary to describe activities with passion such as coming up with terms like ‘twitterverse’ (twitter+universe), ‘tweeple’ (other Twitter users), or ‘tweetups’ (meetups of Twitter users). Back then it didn’t feel that way, but Twitter spurred the imagination of a silent generation to come out fearlessly & communicate and it diminished cultural and geographical distances to unite egalitarian forces.

Continue reading…