I signed up on the Twitter network on 13th of July 2006. The team had launched it in March of 2006 and someone sent me an invite to sign up mentioning that since I liked signing up to new stuff, I might be interested in this as well! Those were the days! I was a “social network” n00b from India, signing up to stuff like “gawab” mail and blogging about innovation consulting and branding design.
With major regrets, and after having looked for that email that first invited me to what was then known as “twttr”, i have not been able to find it. It would have been lovely to thank the person who invited me in the first place. When I did sign up, all I saw were some of the core twttr team members ( I’m assuming ), talking about getting coffee or lunch in Palo Alto. I was in Bombay in those days and couldn’t imagine how I was going to get to Palo Alto any time soon. No one in Bombay seemed to have heard about the green blob of twttr. So I stayed on the platform but didn’t use it.
Till 2008, when Twitter ( they changed the green blobs! ) exploded in India.
The rest, is history.
Some of my B-School heroes have responded to my tweets and I continue to find people who inspire me on a daily basis because they share their insights, knowledge, successes, failures and experiences on Twitter.
This 13th of July, it will be eleven years of me having received that fateful email ( yes really, I absolutely LOVE Twitter ). I have tried writing about this subject previously but those posts never seem to have managed to see the light of day for some reason or another. This time, even though the podcast / video content seems a bit half-baked and rambly, I don’t care.
I remember this one incident where I followed someone on Twitter after I’d met them in real life and then after a few days, unfollowed them, and then after a few more days, unfollowed them and did this 3-4 times. In my mind, I have absolutely no idea what I was doing or why and eventually the lady told me, publicly on Twitter, to decide what I wanted to do, once and for all. At that point, I was not following her and did not have the courage to re-follow her and till today I don’t follow her but I re-tweet some of her stuff once in a while and she does the same whenever she finds something useful.
From those carefree days of Twitter, to now having been forced to learn how to deal with trolls and using tools like seeing no notifications from those without a verified phone and / or email on their profile, and completely no notifications from profiles that are still using the default display picture ( I miss the egg heads! ). Twitter has come a long way. While I’m not directly connected to the team that runs the brand ( it boggles my mind that there’s a Twitter India office now right in my backyard in Gurgaon! ), it feels like I’m part of the brand nonetheless. I’m sure many other early-day Twitter users feel the same, which is what makes Twitter so awesome!
I’m on Twitter as Naina. If you haven’t yet checked out the platform, and you’re the kind of person who knows you will be a “learner for life”, i would suggest you check it out. You never know where inspiration comes from and the inspiration that keeps me sane and keeps me going? All from Twitter.
An Archive of the First 140 People to Join Twitter by Sean Bonner. I’m no. 103 on the list. Coolest list ever 😀
Download Audio-Only here : 57-TNRE-Twitter-Eleven-Years
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