Yo Twitter! Belated Happy 5th Birthday!

Hey did you know that it was Twitter's 5th birthday yesterday? Thanks to this CNN article, it gave me more insights and a bit of history of how Twitter started and how far it has gone today, from having a mere 5,000 tweets per day to fielding 140 million tweets in a typical day, or more than 1,600 every second, as cited in the article.

To be honest, I never knew I'd be using Twitter for my work. Although our market are not exactly active Twitter users themselves, I still dabble a bit in it through sharing articles that sales/marketing peeps might find useful as well as engaging in light and sometimes professional related conversations such as the ubiquitous #blogchat, #StartupTribe, #leadershipchat and #salesplaybook (I think Paul Castain removed me from the SalesPlaybook group in Linkedin as I can't seem to acess it and he doesn't reply to my mail, I'm still not sure why 'coz I sure did followed the rules but that's another story.)

Anyway, I remember the first time I used Twitter. I had a different Twitter account then and I find the website stupendously silly and even quite moronic. Who the hell uses this website, don't they have anything better to do with their lives then, I said, as I pushed away the thought of anything related to Twitter on my mind.

But then came The 8th season of the American Idol, a popular singing show in the US and the contestants started to use Twitter. Being a former fan of the show, I slowly embraced Twitter and became a part of the Twitterdom, as the site gave me instant access to what the American Idol contestants were doing. They'd constantly tweet updates about their rehearsals and just about their lives in general, all in real-time.  It was  like reading a reality-show in constant streams of 140 characters. Interactions between them and the fans were also a daily activity which was a delight to the fanatics, including me, well back then anyway. Stalkers and obsessed fans are to be expected for this kind of set-up, especially if the people involved are so-called celebrities (like the American idol contestants) but nevertheless, Twitter became a vehicle for normal folks to reach out to the dignitaries, making it a surreal experience.

And who knew Twitter would be a useful tool for the business-minded? That it's approaching value would be at $10 billion dollars? And that it would play a major role in terms of rolling out news, journalism and world events? We never know for certain what the future holds for Twitter but for now, the site remains strong, alive and tweeting like never before.

To the Twitterverse and the founders of Twitter, a belated happy 5th birthday to you and more tweets to come! :)

hmm..looking pretty tasty there dorsey ;)