5 days ago
People Share Their Favourite Tweets On 19th Birthday: How Twitter Became Pop Culture Icon
Folks on Twitter came together to share their favourite tweets on app's 19th birthday.
Egg display pictures, 140 characters, and celebrities who spoke like the common janta. 'Aapna kya lena dena," Salman Khan told us in 2010 on Twitter. The screenshot of that out-of-context tweet by Khan is still used as a meme to this date. Twitter, in every essence, was a pathbreaking social media microblogging website. It shrunk the world and brought the quirky (read: weird) minds under the wings. The young folks quickly realised the power of anonymity and began exhibiting their alter ego on a website not frequented by their Facebook relatives. The blue check mark was a flex that the credit card couldn't purchase.
It was a liberating experience. The restrictive nature of words made users think hard and backspace to eternity. The message, even if it catered to 3 people living in different corners of the world, had to be effective. The validation from the strangers meant the world. Retweets mattered, sure, but they were only a byproduct. Twitter knew of Osama Bin Laden's execution before the world did. Before Instagram reels and YouTube shorts, Twitter was the real source of news.
The wings of the Blue Bird may have been clipped, and the iconic name shelved. The 'X' we all know today is only two years old, when Elon Musk walked into the HQ with a sink and gave the app a new identity. The OG Twitter, however, turned 19 years old in July 2025.
Founded by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams, the app has experienced several iterations over the past two decades. But what has stayed intact are the 'tweets" that defined the platform, and people have now gathered to share their favourite takes and interactions on the site to relive the good ol' days.
Bird Is Born
Twitter, founded on March 21, 2006, was created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams as an internal project at Odeo, a podcasting company facing obsolescence after Apple iTunes embraced podcasts in 2005. Dorsey, an Odeo engineer, proposed a platform for users to share SMS-like messages, birthing Twttr, later renamed Twitter. The introduction of hashtags by Chris Messina in 2007 became a cornerstone of its real-time, global communication, uniting people from casual chatter to major events. Twitter's concise tweets, retweets, and hashtags reshaped how governments, brands, celebrities, and individuals connect, leaving a lasting cultural impact.
Nostalgia Time
Pop Base, celebrating Twitter's 19th birthday, asked netizens to share their favourite tweets. It was only a matter of time that the good folks delivered.
We have put together our favourite responses:
— Denis B. Huppert 🇫🇷 (@dennisbhooper) July 17, 2025
you just had to be there — babeganoush 🍉 (@lilGoody2shoes) July 17, 2025
😂 — westerosies (@westerosies) July 17, 2025
— Samuuu | ▲ (@miiyashei) July 18, 2025
I cannot think of this without going into hysterics — Aelfred The Great (@aelfred_D) July 17, 2025
Hashtags
In August 2007, Twitter user Chris Messina introduced hashtags with #barcamp on August 23, a feature that gained popularity and was officially adopted by Twitter in 2008 to tag and group related posts. The hashtag symbol, originally used to label channels on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) in 1988, became a key tool for content discovery on the platform. This innovation transformed how users connect and engage with global conversations.
X
Users on X have no real restrictions on character limit. The modern version of Twitter has an integrated AI chatbot (Grok), also owned by Musk. Posts on X enable the users to earn revenue through engagement and subscriptions. One can even upload an entire movie on the platform if they had free will. The feature of community notes help readers call out fake news.
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