THE EXTENSION

Exploring topics beyond our day-to-day coverage.

For All Its Faults, I'll Miss Twitter If It Vanishes

• John

Twitter has been on my mind a lot over the past few weeks. It’s still hard to believe how quickly it’s gone from a months-long debate over whether Elon Musk would actually buy the company to a hyper-speed meltdown of the service that has been such a big part of the Apple community for so long. I still hold out some hope that Twitter will make a comeback, but the situation is looking bleak.

I set up a Twitter account in 2007, and, like a lot of people, I didn’t use it much for a couple of years. However, slowly but surely, I found developers, writers, and others who were as into apps and Apple as I was. Twitter apps became the design playground of iOS, with a new Twitter client coming out seemingly every week. Then, Tweetie by Loren Brichter was released. In hindsight, that era feels like it was peak Twitter. Apps were pushing boundaries with features like Tweetie’s pull-to-refresh, and Twitter’s atmosphere was a lot less toxic than it is today.