At some point in 2006, or possibly late 2005, Noah Glass walked into our office all excited about something. That in itself isn’t news because Noah was always excited about something. Dude had an energy. Noah worked across the hall from us on the sixth floor of a old broke-ass building in South Park. He came over all the time. He was friendly like that. Here’s why we’re talking about this particular visit: Noah was excited to tell us about a new thing he was working on. “You can use it to send group SMS.”

“That sounds stupid.”

“Look at the logo!”

“That’s even stupider.”

This was my first look at Twitter, or twttr, as it was annoyingly called then. I was right about the logo and wrong about the service. It wasn’t stupid, it was just hard to explain. So Noah showed it to me, and I still thought it was stupid. I’ll admit that it took me a while to get it. I didn’t care what people were having for lunch. I didn’t care where people were at. (Remember, this was also the golden age of check-in services, where people made sure all their friends knew where they were at all times lest they subject themselves to a moment of introspection.) Nevertheless, I signed up anyway, tweeted a few times, and was fairly close to deleting it a few times as well. Until one morning, I was in a cab headed to therapy, which meant I was in a mood and I absent-mindedly tweeted out “I’ve been shot!” then turned my phone off and went to talk to my therapist about becoming a well-adjusted human being.

When I turned my phone back on I had about 20 new messages. Texts, voicemails, and a bunch of tweet replies. Including my now-wife, wondering what hospital I was at. That’s the day I discovered what Twitter was for. It was for having fun. And telling jokes. (BTW, my wife still doesn’t think this was a good joke.) That’s when I was hooked.

The first few years of Twitter were fun. The jokes piled up. I met other people who also liked to tell jokes. We even told a few non-jokes once in a while, like when someone was going through a hard time we’d stop telling jokes long enough to make sure they were ok. Then we’d go back to jokes. But seriously, it was mostly about making jokes. We even had a website that turned our stupid jokes into a deadly leaderboard game:

See that fool peaking out from that bottom right? He does car commercials now. Super famous.

At the same time as we were telling these dumb jokes we were also meeting a lot of new people. Twitter was a really great way to meet people. And believe it or not there was a time when you could say hello to someone and “fuck you you lib cuck” wasn’t the first reply that came to people’s minds! Some of my very closest friends today are people I met during the early days of Twitter. And here’s the really amazing thing: I still haven’t met some of those people. And some of them live halfway around the world.

I also know people who met on Twitter and have children now! Well-adjusted children. This happened. People met. Tweeted at each other. Got little crushes on each other. Figured out ways to meet in person and then made babies! People met on here and started businesses. Advertised jobs. Found jobs. Celebrated kids birthdays, and got support when a loved one died. Then inline images happened and we added photos of cats, kids, and sad Keanu to this wonderful mess.

Here’s an example of the type of image you could add on Twitter along with the caption “A young Ev, Jack, and Biz get their first round of financing.” See? Funny.

Twitter also taught me how to be a better writer. (Count how many of these sentences are under 140 characters.) Seriously. I’m actually a pretty introverted person, and Twitter was a great way to shake that. (I wanted to shake it.) But as stupid as this might sound every little star (they will always be stars) gave me a little more confidence. And eventually what started as a place to tell jokes became a place to talk about design. And I got confident enough to start sharing those ideas too. I’ve written two books about design, and I can trace both of their origins to shit I said on Twitter. And when I was writing those books, I kept my book in one window, and Twitter in another window. If I thought a sentence was pretty good I pasted it into the Twitter text field to make sure it was 140 characters.

Twitter made me a better writer.

My first editor is probably reading that line and nodding and thinking “Fuck you. I made you a better writer, asshole.” And that’s true. But I met her on Twitter.

There was a time where Twitter was a place you went to fuck around, and accidentally made friends and got smarter. It’s been years since I’ve felt smarter after being exposed to Twitter, but trust me, those days were real. They happened.