Happy Birthday Twitter - you beautiful freak

Seven years.

At seven you can star-jump, sing, you probably know the basics between right and wrong... You are self-aware, empathetic  you've got a social diary, you're learning, engaging, interacting, deliberating and deciding.

I celebrated Twitter's seventh birthday by lodging a harassment case with Devon and Cornwall Police against my very own digital harasser who dedicated two whole months to obsessing about me on Twitter. Seven is apparently old enough to be a gutless bully, too.

But that mustn't detract from the enormous joy Twitter has, and still does, frequently bring me.

It connected me to the city when I felt completely detached and far-from-home. It connected me to new friends by the seaside.

It's connected me to men and women whom I admire, agree with and disagree with. People who've informed me, enraged me, advised me, or just given me a little boost when I needed it.

I am joined to colleagues, old colleagues, friends, politicians, presidents and strangers alike, every day.

Is there a more random, more versatile, more powerful invention of the 21st century?

What a beautiful freak. Happy Birthday Twitter.

Hotmail gets Outed

Hotmail.com. Owners of such an archaic form of communications lurk in dark corners of comms existence. We exchange knowing nods in smoky corners of the digital universe.

The chosen ones. The ones who got there first. The ones who never dreamed these emails would open the gateway of our future lives - future bosses, old university friends, partners, parents, siblings and social clubs.

If we knew we would have surely given ourselves better user names. I got away lightly. Ish. LittleJoW. Some hotshot bastard must have nabbed JoW before me - or maybe I just thought it was 'rad' at the time.

An old university lecturer, in a moment of certain madness, had set himself up a far more embarrassing  bizarre  username, akin to LoveItLatinBaby. He held on to it, too. And why not?

As a dog must drag its tail, the original internet dwellers have lugged our hotmail accounts along with us through thick and thin, blindly ignoring the trendies on gmail; scoffing at the toffs of btinternet.

And just as we got old enough to become less embarrassed about those early-years hiccups, much as a tatoo owner must accept his or her mistakes, Hotmail consigns us to history. Hotmail has become outlook.

Those inspirational usernames looking more stupid now, right?

I don't care. I still LoveItLatinBaby.