In November last year, I abandoned my Twitter account – I set it to private, did not visit, did not interact, ignored any direct messages, etc. It was simply too painful to watch friends and coworkers suddenly and systematically being fired, the company culture destroyed, and the developer communities that I supported for 9 years, finally cut off without support or API access. It has been a heartbreaking time.

Today, I took the last step in going back through my password manager vault and deleting all of my X/Twitter accounts. I’ve watched the shambolic rebranding over the past week, and frankly, I wish it had all happened far sooner – rather than seeing my beloved bird being dragged down, and the brand and memory ruined, piece by piece.

There are a few accounts that I share access to with others (for podcasts, sites or communities) that remain, but over the past hour or so I deleted 15 accounts, four of which had associated Twitter Developer Accounts.

Why so many?

• Of course, I had my main account, @[url=https://andypiper.co.uk/author/andypiper/]andypiper[/url], which was first created after hanging out with my friend Roo Reynolds in his office at IBM Hursley, and hearing about Twitter, just starting to gather buzz from events like SxSW. Created February 21, 2007. The title of the blog entry I wrote that day seems accidentally prophetic (although, in truth, I do not regret it at all).
  
  • my jobs at VMware / Cloud Foundry in 2012, and at Twitter from 2014, were both direct results of being on Twitter, sharing my knowledge, interacting with different communities, and doing my work on the platform.
  • I’ve made countless friends through being on Twitter, and I’m grateful for that. It truly changed my life to be there.

  
  

• Back at the start, those heady times of 2007-2009, it was not unusual to have a few accounts for fun, so certainly there were a few of those that just went away.
• There was the time when I was copying friends like Andy Stanford-Clark and Tom Coates, and putting sensors around my house online (there’s brief mention of it in this 2009 post).
• There were test accounts I created for projects as far back as my time doing Service Oriented Architecture things at IBM.
• There were a couple of accounts I’d created during education sessions, literally to show others how to get started on Twitter, growing the user base.
• There were a couple of accounts from my demo apps and projects on the @TwitterDev team, such as the IoT sensors I demonstrated on stage at the first Twitter Flight conference in 2014.
• There were the super-sekrit accounts I had for testing features, such as the original internal test for ten thousand character Tweets (yes, this nearly happened, a long time back), the customisable Tweet Tiles we would have launched at the developer conference that was cancelled at the end of last year, and so on.

Finally, it’s time to say goodbye to my main @[url=https://andypiper.co.uk/author/andypiper/]andypiper[/url] account. Twitter is not Twitter any more, it is X – and I never signed up for X.

In the near future, I’ll upload a searchable archive of my Twitter content, likely using Darius’ Twitter Archive tool. For now, it’s all done. I’m very happy elsewhere (personal sites and links here and here), and I will not be sad that X is out of my life.

… apart from the laptops that they still have not collected!

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#Life #socialMedia #Technology #Twitter