I was in San Francisco this weekend and decided to bring the twitter office cupcakes!

I’m sure judging by my blog entries and my videos.. you all could guess what my favorite website is: twitter! I’ve been on the site since around October 2006 after finding it in a random Google employee blog entry. How I found that entry.. I have no idea.

It was still a young little site with no one @ing each other constantly. It wasn’t conversational but very effective in finding out exactly what my friends were doing (after forcing them to join, that is). I really don’t even think direct messaging was there at the time!

Circa Macworld 2007 I met Leo Laporte on a taping of Mac Break Weekly. During the show when I should have been paying attention to everyone talking, I was busy twittering away about being on the show — I was so excited! Leo took notice of my attention being elsewhere and asked what was so intriguing about my then Treo 700p? I proceeded to explain that I was twittering and everyone was a little skeptical.. until they started using it!

Leo was quick to jump on the bandwagon and brought over the TWiT (this week in tech) army. This was a huge stress for twitter because the massive amounts of people who started joining and following him all at once. He quickly shot up to the most followed in what seemed like a day. It was amazing to watch all of the new conversations start and twitter habits form. People started using @nickname to address other users and shortly after twitter added links to the user profile following the @.

One of the biggest milestones I can remember for twitter was SXSW in 2007 and I wasn’t even at the conference! At this time, I was still getting text message updates to my phone… from everyone! This was also the first time that I had to turn those updates off. People were going crazy and the site was getting so much interest because it was quickly becoming a tool people were relying on. They needed it to stay in touch with everyone at the event. Updates about parties, conversations, meetups and popular quotes from panel speakers were unstoppable. Twitter won the SXSW 2007 Web award in the blog category.

All throughout the 2007, twitter was quickly working on scaling to address their new traffic and discovery. It had it’s rough points, but being one of the first bigger sites to embrace ruby on rails, they had a lot of work ahead of them.

I remember the first few times twitter started breaking into the mainstream world, other than news. They had a quick little feature on CSI and took part in the MTV video music awards. I will also never forget my first twitter earthquake — I was really scared and twittered that I thought there was an earthquake. I quickly ran to my computer to check my tweets and was assured that it was in fact my first earthquake — scary!

It’s been an amazing service to watch grow into it’s current state. It’s now become one of the quickest forms of news travel. When there’s an earthquake, it’s reported on twitter as it’s happening before any new source even has a chance to pick it up. When the Minneapolis bridge collapsed, I heard about it on twitter first and knew my friends were safe by getting their updates. When the US Airways plane crashed into the Hudson, a twitpic of the tragedy was instantly all over the web. Most recently, 200+ cities had twitter festivals on the same day to raise money for charity: water and mostly using twitter to spread the word about the events.

Anyways hope you enjoy the quick video of their office. Twitter has been a big part of my life the past few years and I’m really happy to see how far it’s come. Thanks to Ev for giving me a quick tour!

Feel free to follow me @ijustine if you aren’t already and @ev too!