Waste Half Your Day Looking Up The World’s Earliest Tweets

Twitter, that now ubiquitous social media site/lifeblood of the internet and lonely folks, was officially launched in March 2006 by creator Jack Dorsey to help lazy people communicate with each other in child-speak. For maths dummies, that’s seven years now. Since I’m like this guy at technology, I can’t tell if that’s a surprisingly long time or a surprisingly short time, but I guess it’s impressive?

What’s more impressive, though, are the visionaries who’ve been using the service since its early days. Topsy, a new website that archives every Tweet since the site’s launch, now exists to help honour those early-adopting, tech prophets. You know, like the person who said “penis” on Twitter first. As if you’ve never wondered about that!

Come, let us search through the origins of some now pervasive internet terms…

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“Penis”

Congratulations Nic, you should be immensely proud.

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“Batfleck”

Zach Snyder probably owes ‘Sinister’ some royalties.

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“Kevin Rudd”

Wow, there were parody accounts way back in 2006? That’s incredible. You are a true visionary, (Fake) John Howard.

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“Tony Abbott”

“Federal Health Minister”, lols. But what’s the drug??

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“#firstworldproblems”

Of course it’s about Apple products.

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Game Of Thrones

You have no idea what you started, defunct Twitter person. So let’s give it to Brynn White instead.

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“sext”

Behold, the James Joyce of Twitter.

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“Belieber”

It all started as a typo? That’s kinda perfect.

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“ZOMG”

I have no idea what either of these people are talking about.

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“Can women have it all?”

Geez, good one, Kate Longmoore.

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“#followback”

And it’s a company about organic dog products! These guys are real internet prophets.

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“Miley Cyrus”

Some things never change, Jason.

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“Plato”

Ah, the early days of pretentious tweets. These two tweets offer a useful insight into the way people commonly used this newfangled Twitter thing back in the ol’ days: one, to comment on the form; and two, to post ridiculously mundane shit.

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“#YOLO”

Thanks for nothing, bald dude. More troubling, though, is that it was actually the Twitter tag for California’s Yolo County DA for a long time. Uh, I don’t think any of these stories constitute a #YOLO:

Thankfully, they’ve stopped using that now.

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“Ron Swanson”

Poor real Ron Swanson.

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“#rip”

Fake sincerity: alive on Twitter since Heath Ledger’s death. (FYI, this is the tweet he links to).

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“Twitter”

Goddamn, no wonder I ignored Twitter for so long.

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Have fun wasting the rest of your day here.