i believe i know where the idea for twitter came from.. and it was blogging, which was popular during the first days of social media, like with livejournal that existed even before myspace but what really kicked it off was aol and more specifically aim, aol instant messenger, which was free and you didnt need a subscription. and one feature of aim was the away message, which a lot of people used as a little status. not to say hey i'm taking a shit i'll be back after lunch. people typically put some witty little statement or a joke.. for me i was coming up with something different all the time, like that became the major feature, not just talking to people directly or sending each other proto-memes. and people would often check each others away message without even having to message someone, you could check it like their profile. which was another feature us kids like to constantly customize and change. id really like to go back in time and read some of the stuff i posted. but i believe i know what started 4chan as well because before it existed we would have to directly connect to share photos because uploading and hosting them somewhere was tricky. so there was websites you could use to make your own free website. and i dont mean with templates but html. so i learned a little coding in highschool and was able to upload my files to the database and then use html or directly link it where i wanted to go. and so i was making all these free websites just to host my images and files. and then 4chan came along and was like hey just upload them here.  and the rest is history.
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