One of my early Tweets (in November 2006) was this: "The Blackberry Pearl: My quintessential smart phone". Quite amusing in retrospect but that's what I was really thinking at the time. Now fast-forward to 2012, it's interesting to see how the service as well as its users have evolved. Can you recall some of your earlier Tweets?

Ah, the good ol' days of Twitter. 2006. I remember being stoked on its implications; it was the biggest communications breakthrough since email back ten years prior.

Some of my first memories of Twitter involve the kind of frustration that comes with being an evangelist of something. Remember those days in, say, 1998, when you had to almost BEG your friends and family to get an email account? Twitter presented a similar situation; you kinda felt like you were the only person in your *immediate* real-life social circle that had a clue.

With Twitter evangelism came various forms of criticism from the outsiders. Some of it was just playful schoolyard-type teasing, while others comments went so far as to instruct me to get a life. They scrapped Twitter up as a trend that would pass, like, say, Geocaching. Or perhaps a better example would be DrawSomething. :D (Ironically, many of these people are the same souls who'd been attempting to coax me into joining them on MySpace for years.)

I just dug up a blog post I wrote in rebuttal to said Twitter haters, dated September 2007. Long before hashtags, atting conventions, and retweets. Hell, "tweet" hadn't even become the established term yet; we were still using "twitter" as a verb.

It's not something I'd write today, but it did capture the timely frustration I remember having with people who not only didn't get Twitter, but accused me of making a big deal out of nothing.

I suppose time showed them, eh? No surprise.

jaced.com

Jace, your article from 2007 was on point. Many did not "get it" or see the potential of this new "creative tool" as you precisely point out. As early adopters, we knew right away that the founders were on to something revolutionary.

Twitter tapped into that basic need to communicate and share thoughts and ideas. But all of a sudden, we had a forum to do it in short bursts of 140 characters or less. The concept of brevity and simplicity was the selling point for me.

@Ray: I've always been a fan of the way you used Twitter for Haiku. It was one of those things where I slapped myself and thought, WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF THAT? :D

jaced.com

@jaced Thanks for the kudos. In fact not only was Twitter a great tool for my Haiku project, it also led to both you and I being published in the book "not quite what I was planning- Six Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure". I also recall being one of the first to experience your novel "Under Angels" on Twitter while you were in the process of writing it. :)

Gotta say I absolutely loved the haiku project brother. It really opened my mind to the amazing effect forced brevity can have on art & communication.

Of course my early tweets (twitters, lol, great reminder @jaced) were a little less 'artisitic': twitter.com

But with all the brilliance you've shared on twitter @ray, I did have a little fun checking out the oldtweets search engine ;)

Ray: kellan.io

Hey Jeff, Thanks for pointing the oldtweets search engine, I wasn't aware of it. I got a kick out of reading some of these original Tweets. :) The value we've derived from our interaction on Twitter over the years is mutual. Thanks for chiming in.

Thanks for inviting me to this branch. I do so miss the front end of Twitter timelines. So many great conversations, testing the waters, and experimenting.

The old tweets search engine didn't return any for me. I wonder what other tools exist to hunt down early days tweets.

Hey Todd, indeed! the beginning was so much fun and entertaining. Not sure about the oldtweets search, it only returned 1108 results for me. This article points to some alternatives:

thanks for inviting me. I'm excited for any solution that brings a return to conversation

Hello Duane, always a pleasure to have you in the mix my friend.

Thanks Ray for the link. Seeing a common theme of Twitter now limiting to just over 3k tweets to search back. For some of us that's not far.

Thanks for inviting me... :) I like this! Twitter has become a place for me to get info and resources, but originally it was a great place for conversation. I found Twitter in 2007 while searching for a blogging service, and thought it was perfect for me to start with because of the short posts i could make.

I'm still working on filtering out the "noise" in my timeline. I'm not able to tweet like I want to, but try to be active when I can. Of all the social networking sites that I joined, Twitter is the one that I stuck with. I really like it. Hoping to get that old feeling back soon.

Hey Digi, glad to have you. Interesting point. As Twitter evolves it continues to be a great communications resource, but as you said, along the way we did lose that "old feeling" amidst the noise.

Re: old feel vs noise. It's the general adoption that changes things. Not that what we have today is broken or wrong I'd say, but it definitely is different. Is it evolution?

Re: old feel vs noise.
I do think it's progress and it's a natural thing. Human beings get used to things and even early adopters resist change in the things we love.
As twitter grows up, it will get noisier & more crowded & begin to find its commercial purpose (news aggregator , maybe?). I hope that they never remove our ability to quiet down the noise & focus in on just the few people we want to hear from thru lists & hash tags. Using these 2 tools I'm able to keep some of the wonder and a lot of the human connection that made twitter magical for me in early days.

@Todd, re:oldtweets. Sorry for the confusion; it's a tool someone created to search only tweets from the First year of twitter. I don't come up on there either.

Jeff, thanks for the clarification.
Love that hash tag use has become common. I have searches built on those as well as from my lists.

Been a Tweetdeck user from its earliest days. Sadly crippled now by Twitter.

So here we are for my early days on branch...

My first tweet in march 2008 was "benchmarking...". Then it took me 5 or 6 months to figure out what the service was all about. Meanwhile, the french twitter community began to emerge and for a while it has been almost exclusively the realm of journalists.

I'm curious about how a similar service can evolve differently from one country to another.

@Ray, not really. It feels like I've spent a lifetime on Twitter at this point. What impresses me the most are the number of "twitter friends" that I made in 2006 that I still follow, connect to, and talk with today. People who I may not have followed if I had come for the party later, and not the initial, early-adopter wonder of the system.

@Noah and @Ray, I'm still connected to many of my original contacts. Some of course went by the way side through attrition, but so many good relationships still in place.

@Todd, I used to love tweetdeck. Hootsuite user now.

You bring up an interesting point I hadn't thought of; the good friends I made as a newbie on twitter, would I have met them today? And if not would I (or could I even) make such deep connections if I was a newbie today?

@Ray is an awesome friend of mine & so many others who I love to interact with or meet for coffee or drinks in the real world; I wonder if newbies today are able to get that same experience if they want it.

Es sorprendente que muchos usuarios nuevos abandonan Twitter por no conseguir seguidores . No se dan cuenta q la idea es tener seguidores q sean nuestros lectores .

David, thank you for your interesting perspective on the French Twitter community and its early days.

@NoahMittman Likewise, I still follow most of the original 12 or so friends I started with and of course you were a part of that original dozen. We were all having fun and had no idea how huge this thing would become. Thanks for dropping by.

@Todd Agreed, so many good relationships in place, for sure.

@Jeff In addition, the Long Island Tweet-ups you made famous certainly helped us build on those quality real life relationships that started on Twitter.

Thank you for the invitation, Ray. I hope I can contribute to the conversation.

I find that the people I call "my imaginary friends," because I've rarely met them IRL, are people who I met on Twitter early on. Ray being one of them. I actually feel a sense of trust with them. While I use Twitter for instantaneous political news, I follow only a handful of celebrities, e.g. Rachel Maddow, Robert Reich, Scoble. I have no interest in maximizing the number of followers, so that when people do begin to follow me, and I mean people who want conversation and not customers, I feel like I've been introduced to a new friend.

I also loved the haiku project.

Hola Abel, estoy de acuerdo con usted. Gracias por su comentario.

@ E Brown thank you for joining us and sharing your point of view. I've enjoyed our interactions over the years as well. The Haiku project was an interesting journey and I had fun doing it. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

Cheers!

I joined Twitter really early sometime in 2007 and it had the resounding sounds of silence. No one I knew was on it and I was trying to figure out how I would use it. Today, it is a channel that I love more than FB, connecting me with like-minded people on various topics through hastags.

Made some friends along the way as well :D

I joined Twitter in March 2007 and I was a little over 1 millionth user. Back then, I really didn't understand its use. I have a blog to post my thoughts to when I needed to express something. Blogs were the in thing back then. I didn't know any friends who were already a member so I didn't really get the social aspect of the service.

I joined le Twit in 08 leading up to a high school reunion. But most former classmates were on FB, my use was sporadic at best. Early highlight was having my tweet and Lance Armstrong's tweet - current doping news aside - appear sequentially on my timeline, with both talking about kids & school.

As a self-employed filmmaker / media producer, I'm sure I spent far too much time promoting / shouting and not enough time creating conversations, sharing, and listening. I did have the opportunity to produce a video series on a Stanford Biz School class called Power of Social Technology. Excellent insights into the possibilities with social media ... and that was Jan-April of 10 !

Lots of great takes on our own personal 'early days on Twitter'. Ben is spot on for me; it's about conversation over broadcasting.