/blog

I remarked to my family that yesterday was Twitter's fifteenth birthday, or at least the fifteenth anniversary of Jack Dorsey's first tweet. Some, however, contest that it should really be 15th July when the site actually went live and that Dorsey's tweet was like a baby kicking in the womb. Is this going to be like the Queen having two birthdays – her actual birthday in April then the official celebration in June?

After my saying something dismissive like "oh well, good for them" my daughter replied "you used to love Twitter!" It's true, I did. I wrote on numerous occasions in the early years how I could see Twitter's potential very early on. I joined in December 2006 and by early 2007 was already posting links to my blog – I knew it would be a good means of distribution and a facilitator of conversation.

Sadly, Twitter made a lot of poor choices, at least in my opinion, and were exceptionally slow to innovate and build on what they had with too many false starts and changes of direction when they did decide to act. There were many times when the next move(s) seemed blindingly obvious but the Twitter powers that be were just blind, focusing solely on MAUs and ads rather than actual, useful functionality.

Still, ask a hundred people what they want a service to do and you'll get a hundred different answers. I'm not saying that my ideas were inherently better than anyone else's but, as far as I was concerned, they made sense and fit with how the company was trying to position itself. I suppose I became jaded which is why I placed so much focus on to Google+ when that launched. The damage had already been done so, when things started to get toxic, it was relatively easy for me to say "enough!" and quit.