Twitter turns eight years old today. Like most 8-year-olds, it’s a young, constantly moving mishmash of hilarity, nonsense, and unexpected poignancy, and when it crashes, it crashes hard. Twitter is growing up so fast, guys. So fast.
If Twitter’s birthday has prompted you to take a look back on your time spent microbloggin’, don’t worry: The company anticipated this. Twitter released a tool called #FirstTweet that lets you easily look up your first tweet. No more manually scrolling through thousands of thought-snippets for you. Or any of us.
#FirstTweet isn’t as sentimental a birthday gift as Facebook’s maudlin Look Back videos. Maybe because Twitter is waiting until its 10th anniversary to pull out the big guns—or maybe because Twitter’s a different kind of network. Twitter does accumulate and archive your tweets, yes, but there’s a primacy placed on users generating new content that’s unlike Facebook’s scrapbooky feel. Plus, if you want to see your most popular tweets, there’s no need to wait for Twitter to make a gauzy compilation montage. You can just sign up for FavStar.
Some of us tried #FirstTweet to see how their tweet game has improved.
Some of us tweeted about joining Twitter, as one will:
Hello Twitter. I am going to start tweeting at you. So get ready. Because when I tweet, I tweet hard.
— Aaron Sankin (@ASankin) July 13, 2011
@DougBenson i hope you’re happy – now i have a damn twitter account. all because Doug hates screaming babies &c., &c..
— Challenger (@bakedinapie) March 3, 2010
Some of us tweeted about music.
Real Mississippi black metal http://tinyurl.com/ydqtud4
— Audra Schroeder (@yeahsolike) November 30, 2009
Some of us tweeted what we were doing:
I just ate a sandwich.
— Cooper Fleishman (@_Cooper) July 10, 2010
smokin’ hookah
— Logan ಠ_ಠ Youree (@loganWTF) February 11, 2007
And one of us who still has trouble figuring out how inappropriate she can be in public tweeted this:
Would you rather have a massive, patchouli-scented 70s bush or nipples that look like latkes?
— Kate Knibbs (@KateKnibbs) March 21, 2011
What was your first tweet, dear readers?
Illustration by Jason Reed