Here’s a fun thing for a Friday: go back and see what your Twitter timeline looked like 10 years ago.
Twitter has pretty powerful search settings, but Andy Baio — of Kickstarter fame and more — did the heavy-lifting for us all by sharing a link that let’s you look at your timeline exactly a decade ago, assuming you followed the same people.
Try it here. (The search will work even if you didn’t have an account 10 years ago.)
The mix is eerily quiet, with far fewer retweets and likes than the current time — Twitter hadn’t yet introduced the ‘automatic’ retweet, people were still doing it manually — and no nested replies or link previews, while there are ghosts of once-major social media services, such as TwitPic, TinyURL.
Certainly, it’s a fun way to see how Twitter has morphed, both in terms of features and the actual dialogue of users. The latter, in my experience at least, seems more driven by status update-style tweets than discussions or dialogue and there’s precious little content from media at that time, too. Given how things are today, with polarized opinions and armies of trolls, perhaps the old days of Twitter did have their benefits.
You can, of course, tweak the settings to change the date, language and more to explore past Twitter.
Enjoy — and maybe retweet a decade-old tweet or two while you’re there.