My 10,000th Tweet!

I finally reached a personal milestone today of my 10,000th tweet, so wanted to make it memorable and mean something, rather than just post a food pic or something -- which I often do too, much to the chagrin of some.

Celebrations break out at the 10,000th tweet

Don't get me wrong; there are users out there with tenfold more tweets, very prolific people who seem to spend all day on Twitter and tweet their lives for posterity. Nothing wrong with that -- we all get something different from the service.

I joined Twitter on April 1, 2008 (no joke) and didn't understand it AT ALL. As a professional writer from a journalism background, I was used to telling stories, crafting prose, taking my time to create in-depth and well-researched articles and news items.

Suddenly, I only had 140 characters at my disposal ... including spaces, symbols and numbers! The humanity! How on earth would I be able to get anything meaningful in there?

So, I started off with the requisite "eating my lunch" and "drinking coffee" and "good morning" tweets (if I recall) until I got a little more adventurous, and started RTing people, following those who I thought I'd have no interest in (was I wrong!) and generally becoming more comfortable with the platform.

Then after a few weeks of that, something clicked in my head and I actually began to crave the challenge of still trying to tell the same stories, but being ultra-conservative on wasted words. It was great.

And then when people were actually kind enough to start following me, I upped my game to try and include some interesting content they'd find useful. (I get a lot of hip hop users following me, no idea why!)

Since those heady, early days, Twitter has become one of my daily routines, whether connecting, tweeting jobs (which I enjoy), learning interesting stuff ... and posting about FOOD! (That won't change.)

Onwards to my 100,000th tweet ...