Twitter at 10: It's not about you

When I was in high school I discovered that a well-timed quip or joke in the classroom could make an entire class – even the teacher – laugh or at least react. It was a kind of skill, the ability to think on my feet and the distance from my brain to my mouth being maybe a millisecond shorter than those around me.

It would be 25 years before I connected this relatively minor skill with the perfect digital platform: Twitter.

Twitter and I didn’t see eye-to-eye in the early going. I honestly did not even hear about it until almost a year after Jack Dorsey’s famous first tweet. In my defense much of the world was unaware of Twitter until it made its big splash at South by Southwest Interactive in March 2007. That year, it won the Web award. At that time, Twitter didn’t even have a proper mobile app, so news that it won was delivered to everyone via Twitter SMS notifications. Read more...