While everyone's being nostalgic about what Twitter means to them, I may as well add my two cents.
I didn't give birth to Twitter – that was Jack and Florian. But I was its midwife and adoptive mother; for two months in early 2007, I was the code's sole guardian and caretaker.
I was also the first person to hate Twitter; back when it was SMS-only, I did the math and realized that my immigrant prepaid phone plan would charge me $2000/year to send and receive even a 2006-era number of tweets. 🧵
But, eventually, I came to love it, and it's lived rent-free in my head ever since. In so many ways, it defines me as much as I want it not to. It's a relationship that's unreciprocated – the job will never love you back. A friend used to say that I didn't owe it anything, but ...
Twitter – the concept, not the collection of servers and contracts and code – is something so much bigger than a job. It's the most visceral representation of human communication and ideas that we've ever created. And how do you let *that* go? (no seriously, if you've got ideas!)
@blaine when you think about it like that it's no surprise that Twitter the idea took off right when cell phones started becoming ubiquitous
