Twitter is 10! Were your first tweets as good as these?

Twitter is ten years old today. Ten! Writing 140 character messages has occupied roughly a third of my lifetime.

While I let that sink in, and reassess my criteria for ‘things that are a good use of my time’, let’s take a look back at how the great, good and, uh, ‘other’, announced their presence to the world on the best known microblogging platform.

It’s easy to forget that early adopters of Twitter were faced with the somewhat narrow question of “What are you doing?” Even the best of us can take that literally.

In fact, realising that the obvious answer to “what are you doing?” when using Twitter was “using Twitter”, that message was replaced in 2009 by the more open question of “What’s happening?”, but that didn’t immediately end the banal responses for first-timers:

Still, at least the former leader of the Labour party didn’t fall into the third-person Twitter trap that certain other prominent politicians did:

Some got the hang of it first time with a message so perfectly pitched that news of their arrival couldn’t help but spread:

Others less so.

Of course one person managed such a perfect first tweet that they just never needed to try again.

Show-off.

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