Yesterday I wrote my 50,000th Tweet.

I have seen hundreds of new companies in the five years since Twitter came out (its birthday is today). None has affected my life as much as Twitter has.

Thank you Jack Dorsey. Thank you Ev Williams. Thank you Biz Stone. Thank you to the team of hundreds of Twitter employees.

We’ve had a rocky relationship, yes, but that’s the way it is when I spend so much time with one service.

Thank you for bringing me the world and changing my life.

I’m @scobleizer on Twitter and if you are a geek I want to follow you. Leave a comment here and explain how you are into tech.

UPDATE: I’m very honored that BBC says that I tweeted one of its favorite tweets and that FT says I’m one of the top five most influential Twitterers.

Back in the 1980s when I worked in retail I noticed that people were influenced by other people in their purchasing decisions. Many times people would change their decisions simply because the person next to them decided on a different camera. We are, even as adults, influenced by what others near us buy.

So that’s why I was interested in Wantlet, which mixes social influence into shopping decisions. You ask your friends whether you should buy a Nikon or Canon camera, or if you are a woman, whether this dress or that dress is better.

Wantlet helps out by providing a way to get feedback from other people. Here Kristian Luoma, head of product, shows it to me. Will you use a system like this? Or, will you wait for your friends to tell you to get on it first?

I used to really be into chat rooms, but since blogging, twittering, and Facebooking came along I found it just wasn’t that interesting to me anymore. There were better, and more focused ways, to talk with people about things I cared about.

But Leah Culver thinks she can build a future for chat with her new company, Convore, and fix some of the sins that older chat systems have. Funny, the engineers at Rackspace love IRC too, just like she does. But that’s pretty geeky. Can she get the rest of us to join in?

Based on the new people who are inviting me into Convore chat rooms it definitely has a chance.

I just bought a new iPad which is a 64GB version. My son said “why did you waste your money?” Well, I told him, on my old iPad I filled up nearly 16gb with just apps and wanted more space so I could hold my music. “Get Pandora,” he told me. Heheh. My son telling me something I’ve known for years (I was one of the first people to cover Pandora, years ago). But his insight was deep. No longer are kids storing music, or copying it from each other. They are using streaming systems. And further they want new kinds of music discovery apps. I showed him one new app, Soundtracking, that I came back home from SXSW with. It’s awesome. Here CEO Steve Jang shows it to me. Great app, lots of fun for music lovers, get it on the iTunes store.

One of the cooler things I saw at SXSW was Screach. What is it? It lets you use your mobile phone to control things on a bigger, different, screen.

Think about a new kind of bar game you could play with other people, all from your mobile phones. Take a look at how it works.

I love this new world, don’t you?

You all know I really despise AT&T, even though I continue paying them thousands of dollars per year for three cell phones. Since getting my Verizon iPhone I haven’t dropped a call and I can actually hear the other party. Steve Gillmor got one on Friday and, wow, what a difference. Not to mention that the world’s toughest dead zone: Devil’s Slide is non-existent for AT&T and TMobile, but works the entire way on Verizon for me.

TMobile is even worse. It doesn’t have enough coverage. My entire neighborhood, which includes some of the houses of the richest VCs, not to mention VPs from Apple, HP, and other places, has NO TMobile Coverage. This isn’t back waters of some flyover state. It’s 13 miles from the tech center of the world (at least until Beijing takes over later this decade).

CNBC just announced AT&T is buying TMobile’s US business for $39 billion. More details flowing in on Google News and even more over on Techmeme. That’s one way to get more bandwidth to try to serve iPhone users better before they all realize Verizon has a better network.

I think this COULD be a good thing, if they fill in some of the numerous dead zones and get us better service. I’m stuck with AT&T because I need to head to Europe every few months and AT&T’s iPhone is better there. Also because in other places AT&T does have better coverage, and its data is faster and also I can use data while talking, which really isn’t that big a deal for ME anymore (since I have two phones, I solved that problem).

Anyway, does one bad company buying another make a good one? I guess we’ll see.

Yes, I know I might get crap for calling these companies bad companies, but I’ve paid AT&T thousands of dollars over the last few years. I’ve earned that right.

Speaking of which, why didn’t they just spend that $39 billion making a better network? Oh, do I love capitalism sometimes.

This is a forced marriage due to Verizon finally getting the iPhone. If that hadn’t happened AT&T would have continued not to worry and continued not to invest in its network. Now that they know lots of people will switch when their contracts are up they needed to do something huge to try to improve the network before everyone wises up.