I hear from Twitter that Twitter is 10 years old. 

I have some great memories and like everyone that uses Twitter, very different use cases. 

When I first got into Twitter in 2007 it was a toy. I burped, I farted, I peed and I ate. I shared a lot of it. The financial crisis came in 2008 and by than I had started StockTwits and the idea was to use the $ (ticker) we created to organize stock and market conversation.

In 2008 , I invested in Tweetdeck, Bitly and Betaworks (Summize and Giphy) because I thought they would bring out the true value of Twitter. I think they did. Later our fund invested in Lucky Sort that was acquired by Twitter. 

In March of 2009 we launched a separate StockTwits platform so we could create our own ticker pages and curate. Today, 90 percent plus of StockTwits messages don’t get shared out so we have our own ecosystem of ideas and contributors in real time. The community solves most of my investing needs. 

The rest of the Twitter timeline has become kind of a blur. Now there are 3,000 plus Twitter employees, a stock trading way below its IPO, Ballmer as a major shareholder, and still no tweet editing (really bugs me).  The locking down of the API and the ‘quadrants’ really took the mojo from the timeline and the steam from the growth. 

Today I open Twitter to check who is chatting ‘AT’ me and to see if any of my tweets are getting play. I don’t myself play as much. Twitter is like a friendly planning calendar that I can opt into. 

Today, I start my day by checking StockTwits trending and my stock watchlist and than I go to the app ‘Nuzzel’ to check news from my feed. Twitter is out of my core routine. It’s my spare time chatter network that is still fun and interesting and smart but if they don’t kill Nuzzel…Twitter is a tool (app) I could now live without. 

I miss the idea that every message disappeared forever into a river like the Nile and I miss the utility of Twitter that would just keep changing depending on the apps of the day, week, month that you could use to do wierd and fun things. 

Obviously my investing focus has changed and with Twitter so locked down its not as important to the startup ecosystem as it once was. 

Twitter the product remains amazing. The simple message box still rules. Twitter is the PERFECT armchair quarterback for everything. The game of it from a creators standpoint is still still fun. I’m not sure where the company goes from here so I will continue to watch and comment and opine from the sidelines.