It seems like a decade. This service totally changed my life.

Debut

I don’t know how many French were signing up in early March 2007 but I was, after the famous SXSW that really showed up what Twitter was. I immediately tried it thinking that it was a great idea. Microblogging. Sweet.

It wasn’t to follow friends because even today Twitter isn’t popular in France –at all- so it wasn’t for that. It was for discovery. Hooking up with strangers that’s right. Maybe dating too of course. Whatever was going on.

Everything you do. Even that.

My first follower was Baratunde Thurston. Yes, it was incredibly powerful to see a BLACK MAN on the internet and nerdier than I was. Funny, witty,  in the transmedia-internet-geek world, I thought that was awesome. He had a few hundreds of followers and when he worked his ass off, live-tweeting Obama’s election and campaign it was magic. He’s now Director of Digital @TheOnion and has 74,887 followers… I can’t wait to meet him because it has to happen. So many times I wanted to write to him but was too afraid to lay down some stuff.

French people in Paris on a Saturday night.

I immediately wrote in English. For me it was not even a question –why would I tweet in French when no one understands it?- and I wanted to improve so much at it that I had the idea to bring some rhymes and for like a year and half I tweeted this way and geez, it made my brain stronger and my dictionary skills better despite weird, silly, corny tweets. Mind game.

Twittervision

Anyway I just loved the fact that I had some insight in very different lives across the world, here a geeky mom in St Louis, there a web developer in Czech Republic, UK, US, Sweden, Japan, Germany, Australia… In real time, not on an irc channel with nicknames but on the web, via sms with pictures and “real” names.

More and more it became a really neat source of information too. At first I didn’t want that too much being an avid user of rss but I couldn’t resist and see that I would see a tweet and then the same in the rss feed, later. Sean Bonner showed me how much Twitter is useful and relevant in the news realm.

I giggle every time.

I also tried to follow funny people because the 140 characters limit is great for that. What value can you add on a personal level if you’re not relaying news? Comedy. I stumbled upon Alison Agosti who had about 400 followers. I thought it was a bug when I saw more than 100K like a year later but she’s funny as hell and she has a vagina too so it’s totally normal :-)

But the big thing for me has been the #itstartedontwitter with my Verdell Wilson.

Only the beginning…

It’s also been an amazing tool to connect with indie game developers as the RT process just do that, making you discover someone else via someone you already follow: this is why the new RT ain’t worth shit, making the discovery process less transparent and more intrusive.

Because of the constant stream, the more I was following people –and usually Americans- the less I was caring about France and what’s going on here. I was realizing that like rss I could just jump to the information’s source. More fascinating global, less local circlejerk.

I also saw that Twitter was used a lot by black people in the US and that I was writing English better than 98% of them. That would sometimes make me angry but I would get over it, what else is there to do?

Now I think I’m hitting a wall with Twitter. Yes having friends partying in Austin while having a tsunami in Japan, wars and conflicts in the middle East is like watching a horror movie with a comedy and a documentary at the same time. It isn’t healthy even if as the TV, I’m hooked, reading and reading, trying not to miss a tweet which could ruin the story unfolding in front of my eyes… I mean I knew about upcoming riots in the Middle East weeks before they happened, thanks to Twitter. Twitter gives a sense that there’s no time zone at all but there is and I just can’t keep reading tweets in Paris after California is up because it’s like dozens of updates after each refresh. It’s exhausting.

Backend

On the dev part, I thought Twitter very clever to let people build clients and competing over innovation. Now they’re being like total dicks, blatantly stealing ideas (the Android client was quite unique but not really efficient, the last refresh is a copy/paste of Seesmic) and saying “don’t do anything else guys, we’re in charge thanks”. Not cool.

On the business part, I just don’t get why the Flickr/Pinboard business model (pay once forever or once a year) is so disregarded. What the fuck is wrong with getting real money and stop the ad bullshit? If power users are ready to pay a fee, you should let them: they will drive followers to do so. People made Twitter.

I never had a big thing for trending topics but these days there are like effing useless, full of scammers and fake accounts. I’m still amazed at this 4000+ RT of a fake Dave Chappelle account using the #prayforjapan, what the hell people. Or the all Charlie Sheen thing. Like a lot of things when there’s a crowd, we often all get so dumb.

So I wonder what the future of this service is going to be. Like the internet showed, clones are probably going to emerge, open sourced. Dave Winer is trying to do that with rss so that you can update everything including Twitter in real time with a feed.

 

Whatever happens now, it will never be the same. Thanks guys.