It was originally a base for which people made all kinds of neat things like TwitPic. But then Twitter started integrating everything and competing with all the people who made them great; sometimes even suing them.

I started using Twitter via SMS and before the age of modern smart phones (I was on my Palm Treo. The girl in the cube behind me just got an EDGE eyePhone) and for all my university friends, we used it as a big SMS-based group chat room. It was kinda fun, the total opposite of what Twitter is today.

If you want to hack on platforms and build tooling around them, I suggest people look at ActivityPub implementations: Pleroma, Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed and others. ActiviyPub is really where a lot of the neat federated social networking stuff is happening, and having more devs hacking on it and making more implementations can help keep it diverse and falling into the state where modern E-mail is.

I have similar memories from college. It's weird to think that API Craze was an apex for hacking culture, but things haven't felt as exciting since.

Or maybe I'm just reflecting on a younger period with nostalgia and have lost touch. Maybe those Instagram stickers and TikToks are equally as hackworthy as the things we spun up in the ol' days.

The experience of people getting their business fucked by platforms when they get traction mean that less people will try it again with those new ones.

They seem like our older geocities pages or myspace profiles or tublr blogs but used by more and offering less but expecting less effort to create.

I think a key difference is the Twitter API externalized things (people building on top, creating an ecosystem) whereas IG/TikTok stickers are inclusive and focused on people building within

One favorite recollection of the Twitter API usage was this guy who hooked up a pressure sensor to a Twitter account, and placed the sensor under his newly married friend's bed - and the thing would tweet when the couple got in bed. [0]

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2009/12/12/newlywed-sex-tweets/

A video by Tom Scott exploring that sentiment https://youtu.be/BxV14h0kFs0

That's just how the cooki... er, cloud... crumbles