Eight years ago, NASA launched the New Horizons probe on a mission to Pluto, the U.S. population reached 300 million, Crash won Best Picture, and a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs unleashed Twitter onto the internet, transforming the language 140 characters at a time. On March 21, 2006, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey wrote, “Just setting up my twtr”—the first tweet ever.
Since then the platform has grown to accommodate 500 million tweets every single day. It has played a role in social revolutions, natural disasters, Oscars telecasts, and hundreds of Slate articles. About 241 million people log into Twitter every month. And, as Twitter’s vice president Gabriel Stricker wrote this week on the Twitter blog, “each of you had to start somewhere.”
To mark its anniversary, Twitter has launched a new tool that allows people to search for the #FirstTweet of any user, whether that’s “your best pal, favorite comedian, a star or a president.” (It’s worth noting that this idea is not new—a third-party widget called Oldtweets performed a similar service as far back as 2012, but Twitter’s version boasts an arguably sleeker design.) To find your own first tweet, just go to the tool and enter your username.
If you’d like to compare your first tweet to others’, Slate has compiled some notable ones below, including our own (rather disappointing) first shout out to the Twitterverse. Let us know if you spot any other good ones in the comments.
