Did I build one of the first microblogging tools?

A little over two years ago, in the summer between graduating and starting a “real job” I spent a good amount of time at the gym, brushing up on my various web skills, and building cool apps. I didn’t necessarily want to get rich off them, they were more exercises in taking my ideas and actually doing something with them, rather than letting them linger in the netherworld of unrealized dreams.

One of the ideas I had come up with was a tool called YesterdayI. YesterdayI was based on a simple purpose: just write a short passage about what you did the day before. Meant as a lifestreaming tool, you would end up forming a series of small blog posts, a daily journal of sorts. Microblogging.

I built it, but, as is so common in the world of small web applications, I did a half-assed job at launching it (I’m a rockstar designer/developer, not a marketing guru), no-one used it, and by then I was already on to the next cool idea. So here it stands, frozen in time, lingering on some web-host I have set to auto-renew.

Then Twitter came, followed in suit by a dozen copycats, and made microblogging a household term. Now of course, Twitter serves an entirely different purpose, and has a whole host of features I never had thought of. But it’s always interesting to see how I was on a similar track.

I’m not complaining that someone stole my idea. I may have missed the boat on this one, but at the same time, I am well aware that ideas alone don’t matter. It’s about execution, marketing, positioning, and being in the right place at the right time.

It would be interesting to rebuild this, and see where it could go from there…

Also interesting to see how much my skills have changed since then. From the elementary javascript to table-heavy design (not to mention a generally ugly design), it’s always great to take a look back at past work and critique it, just like an author may look back at an old text or an artist look at one of their earlier works.