The Evolution of Twitter

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I joined Twitter in first year of college, 2009. Twitter was introduced to me in journalism school in terms of its capabilities as a "huge rss feed/wire service". Twitter made it easy to give real time updates on live events, which you could classify using this new thing called hashtags. This was called livetweeting.

If you had a public account, everyone on the Internet could easily access your tweets - a capability that didn't exist anywhere else. You could also personalize your profile to an extent that didn't exist on Facebook, but with less of the options for ugly shit that made Myspace a disaster.

The public relations students at my college were probably learning about Twitter as well. Twitter revolutionized PR. If someone had beef with/questions for a company pre-Twitter, they would have to write a letter to the editor or some shit. With Twitter, people could write literally anything about your company and millions of people could see it just by searching your company's name. I feel like this forced a lot of companies to start using social media. It used to be like the fuckin wild wild west before all these companies figured the game out. You would get real time help and genuine solutions just by talking shit on a company online.

Microbloggers were popular on Twitter. Mans would have all their tweets be about a specific thing, and interested people would follow them. I remember when the dude from "Shit my Dad Says" got a book deal, which legitimized him irl. Funny, cuz nowadays authors are legitimized when they get a blue checkmark on Twitter. How times have changed.

The evolution of Twitter's features/interface has -until recently - been subtle. However the company's "off the field" evolution has been anything but.

Oh dear...

On one hand, Twitter has always struggled to monetize it's success. Plus you have the whole awkward takeover/dismantling of Vine. On the other hand, Twitter has been a key tool in actual political revolutions. It also became a "demilitarized zone" where otherwise boring companies started developing their own voice and even feuding with each other. Twitter's main differentiating factors, the @ and # functions, are now staples across social media.

Twitter changed a whole lot in 2017. The character limit doubled. The Timeline changed from chronological to algorithm based. I'm starting to see garbage in my feed just because someone I follow liked it. Twitter is more and more resembling Facebook to me (aka advertisement soup). I get the feel Twitter may be doing some last-ditch attempt to save itself.

You used to go on Twitter to laugh at dril. Now you go to watch Hamburger Helper combat sexism and see the President of the United States threatening to start WWIII on a daily basis. I honestly don't know what to think of Twitter anymore.