Ten Things You May Not Know About Twitter

By Xavier Lur on September 16, 2009
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1.

The original product name/codename for the service was named twttr; inspired by Flickr and the fact that American SMS short codes are five characters. The developers prototyped with “10958″ as short code, later changing it to “40404″ for “ease of use and memorability.

2.

Its “top secret” Alpha version was launched on March 21 2006 and Jack Dorsey was the first to post a tweet – “just setting up my twttr” at 12:50 pm Pacific time.

3.

Twttr beta was launched on Evan Williams’ birthday.

4.

When Twitter experiences an outage, users see the “fail whale” error message created by Australian artist and designer Yiying Lu, a whimsical illustration of red birds using nets to hoist a whale from the ocean. The message reads: “Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again.” But why 8 birds and not 10 or 15? Well, this is because there are 8 Sun X4100s (servers) behind Twitter. (Of course, there are now more than 8 servers to handle millions of users tweeting simultaneously. The fail whale image was implemented on 2007.)

5.

There are more female users than male, despite the fact that bloggers or Internet marketers who tend to be males dominate Twitter. According to Quantcast’s statistics, females make up 54% of the entire Twitterverse whereas males 46%.

twitter

6.

Till date, millions of users have posted more than 4 billion tweets, according to GigaTweet

tweet

7.

The one billionth tweet was a private message by AnnChan2 (currently, his/her tweets aren’t private anymore). It was delivered on November 10, 2008 at 1:49 PM.

tweet123

8.

According to Sysomos, only 45% of tweets sent were from Twitter.com and the rest were from third-party applications such as TweetDeck, Twitterfon, TwitterFeed and many more.

9.

Twitter didn’t actually invent the @ mechanism within their service. People started using it to specify that a tweet was directed to a certain person back in late 2006, and Twitter didn’t add official support for it until much, much later.

In 2006 -

1n 2009 -

10.

On December 30 2008, Israel’s government held a Twitter press conference to take questions on the situation with Hamas.

israelconsulate

About the Author
Xavier is a 15-Year-Old student from Singapore. He is the founder and the main editor of TechXav. Having a passion in blogging and social media, he reviews Web 2.0 apps/start-ups and writes news related to social media & technology.
Website: http://XavierLur.com
  • Wow! This is cool! Twittered it! Didn't know about most of these. Hehe.
  • In your 7th point, date is wronly typed as 2009. LOL..the tweet was made in past not future!
  • Xavier Lur
    Thanks for the tip! I have already made the changes.
  • Wow this is really an interesting read for every dedicated twitter ;)
  • The billionth tweet is NSFW if you run it through Google translation.
  • this is kewl!
  • ANOTHER great post from Xavier and his "bunch of kid-bloggers!" Go Singapore!
  • Wonderful post, thank you for sharing.
  • Banai
    I like the Israeli press conference happening in a couple months too, written in the past tense.
  • Webcastr
    Regarding your first point, the reason they had to change it was because Teen People alrerady had the digits (TxtTP) according to this great interview in the la times.

    "So we were trying to get "twttr" -- because we could just take out the vowels and get the 5-digit code. But unfortunately Teen People had that code -– it was ‘txttp’ [Text TP]. So we just decided to get an easy-to-remember short code [40404], and put the vowels back in."

    Follow us: @webcastr
  • Number 4 is false: "Lifting Up a Dreamer" (aka: The Fail Whale) was created independently by @yiyinglu , then later purchased by Twitter through a stock agency. It never had anything to do with servers.
  • ReadWriteWeb has a story (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_story_...) about how the image was posted to iStockphoto and not a custom Twitter design.
  • awesome article :)
  • teamnirvana
    A must read for every twitter enthusiast.
  • Cool stuff. The @reply origin is interesting. The web is STILL 45%. Makes me feel a little better when people ask what app I'm using, and I say "Myself."
  • Item #10, "On December 30 2009, Israel’s government held a Twitter press conference to take questions on the situation with Hamas," must have the wrong year.
  • maureenbirdsall
    Great article - THANKS for bringing all these details together. I especially like the "Fail Whale Explained"
  • Cool. Lots of "useless" info, just the kind I like! Jeopardy, here I come!
  • That is some fun stuff statistics. Did you know that my Twitter ID is ColderICE, LOL....Thanks for posting this.
  • cool =)
  • vamp124 (Barb)
    Pretty interesting!!
  • Rhonda
    Number 10 date needs to be checked..December 30, 2009 has not happened yet.
  • wow.. Twitter is so nice name..

    btw, thanks for sharing
  • Great article guys! Love the screen shot of Jack's first Tweet!
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