For a good half decade, the social media landscape has been relatively stable. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are the Kings, and though others have risen and fallen (Vine, Snapchat), the bedrock has remained mostly untouched.
Importantly, though, it didn’t used to be that way. In the early 2000s, after the Dot Com Boom and when broadband internet gained widespread usage in the United States, entrepreneurs created a bevy of social media websites and services. Their names will conjure intense nostalgia for those who lived through it: AIM, Xanga, Friendster, Myspace. Generation X will not remember this, but at one point Myspace was as ubiquitous as Facebook is now.
One of the bands I was into in high school–The Afters–included a song called Myspace Girl on their 2008 album Never Going Back to OK. At the time, it was a sweet and quirky tune about how one of the band members met his future wife by finder her on Myspace after a chance meetup at a fast food restaurant.
Now, the song seems incredibly outdated, which is fascinating because it is only nine years old. Myspace terms like ‘Top Eight’ and a play on words about turning ‘Myspace’ into ‘Ourspace’ are bizarre, and after almost 15 years of social media etiquette having developed this seems more like a particularly egregious case of digital stalking than something that deserves to be a song.
The point is: back in the late ’00s, social media was new. Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook in 2004, and it wasn’t until 2006 that anybody could join; it didn’t turn from ‘place where high school and college kids hang out’ to ‘place where adults make racist remarks in the comments section of a news article’ until 2009 at least .
And Twitter–oh, Twitter–Twitter was a totally different place in 2007. People were just learning to use it. At the time, it seemed idiotic, at least to me: what’s the point of Twitter at all? It’s just the ‘status’ line from Facebook? Laaaame.
I joined Twitter less than five years later and it is so much more useful than Facebook has ever been, especially for my work with Royals Review. Suffice it to say, this status did not age well.*
*In multiple ways! Remember when statuses said by default ‘YOUR NAME is’ and then what you put? Then, remember when they got rid of the ‘is’ and you could use any verb you want? Now, your name is not even attached to any status–or ‘post’, I suppose it is now. Social media is whack.
Twitter was lifted out the primordial internet soup in 2006, and it will celebrate its twelfth anniversary this month. As for any social media service, it took people a few years to learn it and utilize it properly.
And that led to this, the Greatest Tweet of All Time:
Yes, that’s the official National Football League team the Los Angeles Chargers tweeting about needing to go to PF Changs. And before you ask–yes, that was the Chargers’ official Twitter account back in 2007.
How did this happen? Well, Rodger Sherman over at SB Nation looked into it and has an explanation. Essentially, Joel Price, a digital media employee for the Chargers, snagged the @Chargers handle and began tweeting both personal and Chargers things. After a few months he got his own handle, @joelprice, and the @Chargers account became the official account of the team, as is standard practice nowadays.
But they never deleted Joel’s early musings. So now, it just looks like the Chargers have an undying love for PF Changs.
This tweet is also just pure comedy gold. Everything is perfect. He’s not ‘so’ hungry; he’s ‘soo’ hungry. He could have said he needed to ‘meet his wife’ or ‘go with the wife,’ but he used the much more colorful ‘find my wife,’ as if exploration is a common precursor to food consumption for him. And PF Changs is the type of perfect specificity that makes comedians’ jokes work: it’s well-known enough that pretty much everyone has seen one or been to it at least once, but it’s off-the-wall enough to add a level of ridiculousness to it all that makes it even funnier.
Are their funnier tweets? Sure. Are there better ones? Sure. But this is the perfect tweet: it’s an insight into the history of social media, a hilarious declaration of hunger, and a bizarre anachronism all at once. It is the best tweet of all time.
Something Clever 