Ten Years of Twitterism

Yikes! Time flies, as they say. I opened my Twitter account (@wade_watson) in 2007-- almost ten years ago. When I first signed onto Twitter, Leo Laporte (@leolaporte) was the most popular Twitter user with something like 50,000 followers. Donald Trump was years away from even hearing the word "Twitter". At that time Twitter was so small they had a all-feeds page that would show every single tweet as it was posted-- and it didn't roll all that quickly much of the time.

I must say, I miss those early days a bit. Back then, Twitter really was just a cozy little community of pretty friendly geeks. The nearest we had to celebrities were Leo, Kevin Rose and few other web geek heroes. The growth of Twitter as a worldwide communications phenomenon was gradual and I watched every step of it. Here's what happened as I saw it.

Since I first learned of Twitter from Leo's TWIT podcast, I followed all the folks who appeared on TWIT-- people like John Dvorak, Jason Calacanis, Tom Merritt, Molly Wood and Veronica Belmont. I haven't heard much from Jason in a while, but I still catch much of what the others do, particularly the wonderful Ms. Belmont. She must have opened her Twitter account it's first week, because she has an account named @Veronica. Anyway, one day back then, Veronica tweets about this actress who was doing something unheard of then-- a fictional web video series. Her name was Felicia Day (@feliciaday). I started following her both on Twitter and through most all that she does and still do. I think Felicia may well be the unsung key element of Twitter's outrageous growth.

Felicia was a struggling Hollywood actress best known for repeated appearances on the last season of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. But she'd been a gamer and online user since her childhood in the '80s. She had both considerable geeky charm and a natural way of fitting into and making use of web media-- and continues to do so today.

I think Felicia may be the single most important factor in the Twitter revolution. Felicia befriended we Twitter geeks, but she also had friends in the Hollywood community. As best as I know, she introduced Twitter to such people as Allyson Hannigan, Neal Patrick Harris and Jimmy Fallon. I'm sure there were others as well, but those three alone would spread the word pretty far. Very soon after that, those guys and others started mentioning Twitter on national American TV talk shows. Twitter use quickly spread around the Hollywood scene, then the New York City media scene and that brought it to the TV news people. That led it to the politicians and reality-TV billionaires. I'm not blaming Felicia Day for Donald Trump (she would be seriously pissed at the idea), but I think she was stepping stone on Twitter's walk to where we are today with it. If it hadn't been Felicia, it might have been somebody else.

In spite of my long Twitter tenure, I really don't (and have never) tweeted that

4 very smart people

much. I mostly use it to follow other people (like Felicia, but not The Donald). I categorize my follows into Twitter Lists now and usually skip directly to a list like "Show Biz Types", "Art", "Pop" and "Smart People". While Twitter isn't the small community it once was, it often surprises me how many people are paying attention to my fairly rare tweets. I may do a separate post with some of those stories sometime. Since Twitter by default sends people emails or posts a notification every time you mention somebody's name, if you talk about someone, they may just reply.

Anyway, this ramble has achieved it's goal of exceeding 141 characters by many times over, so I'll sign off for now. Happy tweeting and remember the old days when it was just us nice people.