

Internal status email: Twitter at 3 months old. 160 Users & 100 Tweets per day  - rabble
http://anarchogeek.com/2011/03/23/old-twitter-email-160-users-after-three-months/

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romeda
This is remarkable, even to me. The main point: if you're doing a startup,
things take a _long_ time. Longer than you'd expect. And overnight success is
anything but.

~~~
cookiecaper
Personally 160 users sounds like a lot to me. None of the unfunded services
I've bootstrapped had reached that.

~~~
rabble
Mind you, these aren't paying clients or anything, just a 160 twitter
accounts. At the time you had to have it created FROM a mobile phone, so the
onboarding process was clunky. We were showing it to our friends, tell them
how cool it was. A team of 10, with 3 months to pressure their friends and
family in to using the service, got 160 users.

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blhack
Does anybody have any information about the types of things that twitter did
at first to market themselves?

This is a problem for me doing thingist (<http://thingist.com>)... the people
who have found and signed up for it seem to have really liked it, but I'm
having trouble figuring out how to get _more_ of those people.

(And I am an admittedly horrible marketing person)

~~~
makeee
If I were you I'd add a facebook like button to each thing and allow people to
create lists of things they love just by clicking the facebook like button (no
registration required, just save their list to a cookie).

Then if they signup they can save their list. This makes it easy for users to
jump right it in, and may bring in a lot of traffic from facebook. Of course,
some users may not want to share each thing they like on facebook, so you'd
probably want a normal "love this" button as well for logged in users.

~~~
blhack
There are like buttons on the item pages... (like here:
<http://thingist.com/t/item/4720/>) I tried putting them in the feed, but they
looked really out of place (it made things look really really cluttered)

I really like the idea of [optionally] importing facebook likes... Hmm

(As a sidenote: can I just point out that facebook's API is freaking
_awesome_?)

~~~
saranagati
> (As a sidenote: can I just point out that facebook's API is freaking
> awesome?)

No you may not. Facebooks API is horrible. I was just implementing the like
buttons on my site and realized that they have to be iframes (even the FBXML
or whatever its called creates iframes). This turns out a bit ridiculous on
pages such as yours (if you put them on the feed page) and mine where you
Twitter on the other hand allows you to just gives you a URL which points
users to a link to share the page.

~~~
blhack
Well, you could write your own, but you'd have to have users authenticate the
application. In my opinion, this isn't _much_ different than twitter, since
both actions would require two clicks:

facebook: click your custom widget -> facebook prompt -> perform action

twitter: click your custom widget -> twitter prompt -> perform action

(Or just do like I do, and change the size of the iframe to 450x20)

~~~
saranagati
as far as i'm aware, you can't really write your own. I was watching the
network traffic for a submit and it was pretty ridiculous how many
transactions it did when you clicked "like" (about 4 if i remember correctly).
Having the users authenticate the action would actually be good for sites like
mine but facebook doesn't seem to provide that option.

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foca
"We receive about 100 status updates per day". 5 years later, the average
number of tweets per day is 140 MILLION.

(According to <http://blog.twitter.com/2011/03/numbers.html>)

~~~
Blocks8
Loved that! It's great to see that even great big things start small.

------
dualboot
Google Cache Link :
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy&...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy&hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fanarchogeek.com%2F2011%2F03%2F23%2Fold-
twitter-email-160-users-after-three-months%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1)

~~~
RobMcCullough
How did you find that? I found the original article in Google but there was no
link to a cached version.

~~~
dualboot
Take the URL you're trying to pull up and search for

cache:<target URL here>

~~~
Natsu
In Firefox, you can also bookmark the URL

<http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:%s>

Then give it the keyword 'cache'.

From now on, from the URL bar, you can just type cache <whatever> and it will
go straight to a search for the cache of that.

~~~
RobMcCullough
Very cool! Thanks for the replies, good to know.

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amitparikh
I'll be the first to say... Thank you for putting the vowels back in your
name. "Twttr" looks horrible.

~~~
jeremymcanally
The name has always been "Twitter," but they were wanting to get the SMS short
code "twttr." Unfortunately for them (fortunately for us?) someone already had
it. :)

~~~
rabble
It was always PRONOUNCED twitter, but we did write it twttr, everywhere, back
in the day.

~~~
jeremymcanally
Right, that's what I meant. :)

~~~
rabble
Yes, the twatter thing, wasn't something we thought of, but many other people
had it pop right in to their heads. It was, unfortunate.

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RobMcCullough
Link is dead or down, I can't wait to read this!

~~~
rabble
Not sure what happened, sshing in to the server and poking around.

~~~
jedsmith
Probably your Web server OOMing the box? Check dmesg.

Apache-specific advice: if you're on a small VPS or other box with not much
RAM, and didn't tweak the distribution defaults for MaxClients and friends in
its configuration, a HN-size load will OOM you rapidly, _especially_ with
mod_php. The defaults for prefork MPM are nuts in the major distros (as in,
assuming 4 GB of RAM or more for mod_php).

Since you're going up and down, I assume this is the case. I suggest dropping
MaxClients to 5 for now and letting us wait a bit.

~~~
rabble
Yeah, i thought i had it back up, went in to a meeting, came back and it's
down. When i went in and looked at it there were a ton of apache2 processes.
It's my blog server, so i don't pay a lot of attention to it, i probably
should.

I dropped down the number of preforked apache processes, we'll see if that
helps. It's also where i run some rails experiments, so we'll see. Load's back
up to 7...

I had no idea hacker news got a lot of traffic.

------
bane
Having just launched Momentomail and watching our userbase _slowly_ grow
despite quite a bit of effort to get coverage, it's been a struggle to keep
positive.

This is a great story that put a bunch of hot air in our balloon tonight as we
realized we're actually not too far off this track.

We have no expectation of being another Twitter by any possible stretch of the
imagination, but finding out that at this early stage we're tracking with a
reasonable expectation is a great point of validation.

------
c2
"Older" hackers take note: Biz Stone, Evan Williams: 30+ founders club. They
were both over thirty when twitter started.

~~~
rabble
Ev started his first company when he was a teen, and kept starting them over
and over again. Biz had founded Xanga, many years before. Sure, they were over
30, i think Jack and Noah were too, when twitter got started. All of them had
started earlier companies in their teen's and 20's.

~~~
c2
Jobs also started NeXT when he was 30 after founding another well known
company years before. My point is age shouldn't be a barrier to starting a
company you believe in, especially not the imaginary "30" line.

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budu3
Interesting how he signs of with "keep twttring". I that email was written
today it would have been "keep tweeting".

~~~
rabble
Nobody liked the word tweet. It was a term created by the user community, and
only slowly accepted by the team.

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techsupporter
For nostalgia's sake (if it's suitable to reveal), what was the original
number that Twitter used?

~~~
rabble
The first email i've got from jack, saying he's got a prototype running on his
laptop is from March 14th 2006. He called the app "twttr stalker" in that
email. I remember it being "friend stalker" as a joke name thrown around as
well.

