(CNN) — As a tech reporter, it’s my job to catch trends as they’re developing — to be ahead of the curve. I like to think I do a pretty good job, but I will forever have one hilarious black mark on my resume.

My first tweet.

“I am already kind of over Twitter,” I wrote on April 5, 2007. Twitter was a new service back then, and I had signed up early enough to get a pretty cool username. Frankly, I didn’t think much of it since it seemed like a mild update to the IM status messages I’d already been using to communicate with my friends for years.

Boy, was I ever wrong.

Twitter has grown from being an insider back channel for tech nerds into being the insider back channel for the entire world.

It is everywhere at once and everything to everyone: a public broadcast platform, a private messaging service, a way to share photos, a late-night therapy session, a journalist’s best friend. We expect people to be their most honest on Twitter — and that honesty can spark firestorms of controversy.

Television executives say that Twitter has brought live TV back to life after years of wilting in the face of the DVR — we’re “social watching” now, which means we all want to tweet about shows as they’re happening. Celebrities use Twitter to talk to their fans without media and publicists in the way — and their platforms can be so valuable that they can earn thousands of dollars per tweet. Every journalist I know says Twitter has redefined the way news is gathered and shared — stories break on Twitter now, not on TV or in the newspaper. Read further.