In 2018, Twitter is a rotating playlist of Donald Trump yelling, folks competing daily to find out who can be the most mad online, and jokes like “I want to die, this is hell, please someone put my head into a trash compactor.” But in 2008, barely anyone used Twitter, and those who did didn’t really know what it was for. It was great!
Andy Baio has sent everyone tumbling back to that better time and place thanks to a very specific and special Twitter search:
Take a spin for yourself. Mine was pretty great ten years ago:
You can play with the dates a bit if you want; in the search string posted above, it’s the “2008-05-25” that determines when you start reading your timeline. Try putting in, say, “2008-11-05” to see what your timeline was like when Obama was elected.
Less fun, but perhaps more illuminative: Advance the date one year forward (e.g., put in “2009-05-25,” then “2010-05-25,” and so on) and see as more and more people you follow join Twitter, and slowly poison themselves by becoming too online. It’s like one of those time-lapse videos of an animal rotting and exploding into maggots, except instead of a dead fox, it’s everyone’s brain!
