Twitter turned 7 years old this week. It makes me more grateful than ever for WordPress. Without WordPress, I would not have learned to write with my own voice and style.

WordPress is an awesome platform. WordPress is pretty damn open. Matt Mullenweg is really accesible. Matt is the founder and still pretty much in charge. He was like 15 when he started it. WordPress has community. WordPress powers so much media, but is rarely in the media. I meat Tony Conrad, Stocktwits first venture capital investor, through WordPress. Tony was Matts first investor.

But it is Twitter’s birthday and I am grateful that it exists and thrives. Twitter is a great platform.

How are two great publishing platforms so different?

Twitter is more famous than any and all of it’s 200 million ‘users’. Twitter is LA. Nobody likes LA. Twitter is a huge media company and few like huge media companies.

I started liking Twitter 2008. In late 2008, I was all in and I dove in to the reasons why. When I started Stocktwits in 2008, Twitter was well on it’s way but when I talked to traders and investors about Stocktwits and said …’we were like a Twitter for markets’, people would say …what’s Twitter. That was a problem.

Being one year late to a massive trend can cost you a lot of money, even when you catch the majority of the trend.

But thank you WordPress for helping me catch a lot of meat on this continued trend in web publishing.