Happy birthday, Twitter! The social media platform is 10 years old today, but Twitter kicked off the celebration early with this tweet and video on Sunday.
Over the past 24 hours, the love for Twitter has been pouring in from all across the globe in the form of tweets, articles and blog posts. I’m happy to see this, because Twitter has taken more than its fair share of grief over the past few months. Some people aren’t crazy about how Twitter has tweaked its timeline. Investors want to see more growth. And Twitter’s toying with the idea of expanding the character count from 140 to 10,000 has irked many users, including me.
I haven’t been with Twitter since the get-go. (Few people have.) But I signed up in September 2007 — so I’ve been on the platform for eight-plus of its 10 years. I’ve remained fairly active as a Twitter user, mainly because it remains my go-to learning network. It’s also been a way of connecting with many people I’ve never met in real life but feel like I know. Sometimes, those online connections lead to offline meetups, which is always great because I feel like I know some people — or something about those people — before I ever really meet them.
I think Lance Ulanoff best describes how I feel about Twitter in his Mashable article on the platform’s 10th anniversary:
My relationship with Twitter is best summarized as the kind you have with a sibling. I love it, deeply, but also question its choices. I can be vocal in both my admiration and my dissatisfaction. Yet, at the end of the day, we’re tied together.
Twitter got 2016 off with a buzz by 
Once again we find ourselves nearing the end of another calendar year. And as certain as the sounds of Christmas classics in shopping malls, so too come the multitudes of articles and blog posts offering year-in-review perspectives and retrospectives. As a blogger, I feel an obligation to join this herd. As a blogger in the niche of higher ed marketing, I feel an obligation to focus on that topic. So here are five big things that happened in higher education in 2015 and my thoughts on what they might mean for academia in the coming year: 