Year: 2020

Eleven years ago, today, I joined Twitter and started posting The Daily Mobile.

4,018 days have passed since then, and I have managed to post an image taken with my cameraphone on each and every one of them.

Here’s the first The Daily Mobile ever posted:

I know. Stunning, right?

Sharing your mobile phone photos online isn’t a very novel idea today, but when I got my first cameraphone in 2007 having a camera on a cell phone was still considered more of a marketing gimmick rather than an indispensable component.

The first generation iPhone was yet to be released and the vast majority of the world’s phones were “dumb”. Sharing photos was cumbersome (Instagram wouldn’t be launched for another three years), and the data required to do so directly from your phone was limited and often prohibitively expensive. Even I had decided that a camera was an unnecessary expense when buying my first cellphone two years prior.

But once I did have one, I realized how amazing it was to have a discrete and compact camera with me at all times almost as quickly as I maxed-out my phone’s memory taking photos. It wasn’t long after that I started thinking about ways to share the images I was capturing on a daily basis.

Thus “The Daily Mobile” was born. The posting workflow was cobbled together using Twitter, TwitPic (who else remembers TwitPic?) and a microblogging site called Posterous—which eventually lost marketshare to Tumblr and was shuttered. Now I can post directly to EricBrazier.com and it gets shared everywhere (including Tumblr).

Anyway, thank you to everyone who has ever liked, shared, favourited, retweeted, saved or bookmarked my mobile phone photography, and I hope you’ll continue to follow me for the next 4,000 days.

Cheers,

Eric