Twitter captured some of the biggest news in tech this year — a recap of 2018.
Elon Musk, Facebook, cryptocurrencies and Fortnite helped define the year in technology in 2018.
Here’s a look back now at the year in technology media — in tweet form.
It was less than 12 months ago when start-up Ripple was sitting on close to $80 billion of XRP, a cryptocurrency that trades publicly like bitcoin. Celebrities including Paris Hilton and Jamie Foxx were endorsing coin offerings.
Since then, the total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies has fallen by about 80 percent .
This tweet from Ripple sums up the mood in January, when the buzz around crypto’s surge had taken the tech world by storm.
Facebook didn’t have the best year from a public relations standpoint. It got a lot worse as the year progressed. But the drumbeat had started by February, punctuated by actor Jim Carrey’s tweet that he was selling his Facebook stock and deleting his page because of the company’s dissemination of false information ahead of the 2016 U. S. presidential election.
In the land of video games, Fortnite owned 2018. It’s still a bit unclear what the rise of Fortnite means for the technology world. Will today’s pre-teens and teenagers use video games as their primary methods of social contact, eschewing social networks? Will Fortnite become the bedrock game of choice for years to come, lifting the valuation of Epic Games even higher?
We don’t know yet, but it certainly made a star of Ninja, who told CNBC in March he made $500,000 a month playing the game in what is thought to be CNBC’s most retweeted tweet ever.
Mr. Zuckerberg goes to Washington.
The Facebook co-founder and CEO answered questions from lawmakers about the company’s use of a data, a problem that would linger with Facebook throughout the year, after a series of investigative reports shed more light on the company’s procedures.
And after years of flirting, T-Mobile and Sprint finally pulled the trigger and announced a merger, which could take the number of U. S. major wireless companies from four to three. It’s still unknown if U. S. regulators will allow the deal, though it did gain approval from U. S. national-security officials on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U. S. last week. If a deal does go through, we’ll miss T-Mobile CEO John Legere throwing shade at Sprint. He reminded us of that with this friendly announcement of the deal in April.
Netflix announced Barack and Michelle Obama entered into a multi-year agreement to produce content for Netflix, reinforcing the importance of original content to CEO Reed Hastings’s strategy.
