“Just setting up my twttr”: Jack Dorsey posted the first ever tweet on 21 March 2006, when Twitter was still a vowel-less side project of podcasting firm Odeo. The decade since then has been a riot of hashtags, feuds, breaking news, white and gold black and blue dresses, spoilers, one-liners, furious men’s rights activists, political movements, tweetstorms and celebrity bottoms.
What might the next decade hold in store? Here are some confident predictions for the next 10 years of Everyone’s Favourite Social App That Isn’t Facebook, or WhatsApp, or Facebook Messenger, or Instagram or Snapchat.
1) When the 140-character limit disappears, Kanye West will be 94% of the average user’s timeline.
2) Stephen Fry will leave and rejoin Twitter once a year, on average.
3) The Deep Drumpf neural-network Twitter bot will strike another blow for AI against humankind by defeating Hillary Clinton in a televised debate.
4) Twitter will follow Facebook in adding new ‘reaction’ buttons as alternatives to liking or retweeting. ‘THIS’ and ‘Check your privilege’ will be the first to be added.
5) After outrage over non-chronological timelines, Twitter will switch everyone’s timelines to chronological, starting in 2006, to see how much they like it.
6) The number of times The Death Of Twitter is predicted by experts will narrowly outnumber the number of times hoax deaths of celebrities are retweeted.
7) In an effort to compete with Snapchat, Twitter will launch a feature for scribbling doodles and sending them to other users. Every prominent woman on Twitter’s inbox will fill up with badly drawn penises.
8) Concerned about people staying off Twitter to avoid TV spoilers, the company will hire an army of interns to creep into people’s houses at night and whisper upcoming Game of Thrones plotlines into their ears while they sleep.
9) Still, 10 years in the future, no one will ever have clicked on a promoted tweet on purpose.
10) Ed Balls.
