Since I know not which will be last, I am doing my own archival work here. This was my first day twittering on January 31, 2007:
This first day’s glorious messaging says so little about the future. Here is that fateful day, with tweets in chronological order:
Looking at a long list of Cole’s twitters
Alan Levine tweets on January 31, 2007
twittering while on a teleconference call- can they hear me typing?
setting up a google doc for a project, for once someone suggested it before me
duh, i verified my account twice
getting a bit addicted and not doing any work
twittered my background
Getting ready to blog about twitter
NetNewsWire? That is so old skool
getting ready to publish my blog post about twttter
All blogged! See http://cogdogblog.com/2007/01/31/networking/
I blame Cole for my new habit
It’s all a bit… like drivel. Brief (those precious 140 characters), no images, no hashtags, URLs are just plan text. Alan’s normal typos.
I do blame/credit Cole Camplese, then at Penn State University, for making me aware enough (likely through his blog) to give it a try (his blog post is gone, closest I could find was via the Wayback Machine). I do recall he talked a bit about the potential of it for his PSU team to quickly, update each other on project, being more efficient than email. Hey! Cole invented Slack!
I even managed to blog about it:
And D’Arcy Norman must have been tapped by Cole too as he has a blog post the same day, the post is intact, and also quite a bite more informational than mine:
Until last week, I hadn’t heard of Twitter. Then Cole blogged about it, and the ETSTalk Podcast folks talked about it. They’re looking at Twitter as a tool to facilitate shared awareness of organizational activities.
Twitter is essentially nanoblogging (I just made that word up) – stuff that is more of a quick “I’m doing this right now” kind of status update rather than a blog post. You create a set of “friends” and get to see updates in almost realtime of what they’re up to. Right now.
Cole’s investigating this from the perspective of “how would a tool like this affect teaching and learning, and running an organization” I’m not doing anything quite so lofty, I’m just playing.
What’s kind of cool is that it makes it easy for me to track what I’m doing, so when it’s time to do the Dreaded Procrastinated Timesheet Entry mere hours before the payroll cutoff, I could just spider the list of archived updates.
https://darcynorman.net/2007/01/31/twittering/
I like how D’Arcy and I call the activity “twittering”. Maybe that will come back in vogue. Or die on the vine.
How can you find your first day? There’s more than enough posts that tell you how to find the first tweet via Twitter’s advanced search (while it lasts). Use your profile to find out what Twitter reports as your “since date” and then construct a search that wraps around it with “since” and “until” dates for search parameters. So for my bird born date of January 31, 2007, I found it worked best to use the day before as since (January 30, 2007) and two days after (February 2, 2007) as ai noticed some did not come through with more bookended dates.
Oh also key os to switch the default tab at the top from “Top” (useless) to “Latest”
What was your first twittering day look like? What will your last one look like?
Looking at your own tweets is of course navel gazing, for more perspective, I made a little tool (using a great tip from Anil Dash) that lets you dial in any date in history, and see what all the people you follow now were twittering that day. Give the Twitter Time Tunnel a spin. Here I am diving back to my first twittering day:
Actually I can see I am actually getting up to the day before, I might have to adjust the code! But anyhow, this was the discourse then among people I follow now
This is starkly different from 2022. I am not saying better or worst.
Time travel is trippy.
Featured Image:
What a fun post, dog. It’s great seeing your tweets then (hello, Cole!).
The Time Tunnel is brilliant.
I found my first posts. These were different, bringing up all kinds of emotions. Maybe I should blog this.
It seems appropriate that I read this post in NetNewsWire, still going strong in 2022…
Doing the RSS Reader thang, just like the ancient web craftsmen! You go… NetNewswire was my first (I probably just copied you), good to know it’s still doing its thing. I cringe everytime someone pontificates about the death of Google Reader killing RSS, there is nothing father from the truth. If you keep your subscription file, it works in any reader, you never lose a thing.
Feed on Brother D’Arcy!