Tweets from a decade ago reveal a simpler time on the internet

Former Kickstarter CTO Andy Baio hit upon a most excellent discovery recently: a quick way to surface tweets from your timeline from exactly 10 years ago. Here, try it for yourself.

Yup, those are decade-old tweets from the people you follow now While we obviously won’t get to see the same set of tweets, you’ll probably get a similar sense of how Twitter – and the world, I might argue – was more innocent back then.

Running through my ancient timeline, I see chatter about FriendFeed, a social network from back in the day, news about Oppo making portable music players, a recommendation to use GrooveShark for free music streaming, Facebook celebrating the first anniversary of its Platform API, and a pre-Uber Travis Kalanick asking the Twitterverse for suggestions for things to do in rainy Barcelona (he received none, possibly because he had less than 25 followers at the time).

It’s hard not to miss the simpler times we once lived in online – even if they were bereft of inline media, 280 character-long tweets, and a much longer list of people to follow.

I encourage you to try Baio’s trick for yourself (it works even if you didn’t have a Twitter account 10 years ago), and to also try tweaking the date in the URL to see tweets from other points in history. And finally, I’d like to leave you with this post from our dear friends at TechCrunch that feels especially poignant today:

ok Twitter. Good night. And Happy Birthday, Facebook Platform.

— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) May 24, 2008