
The New York Times’ most famous tweet is ten years old - uptown
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/03/word-up-this-is-the-story-behind-the-new-york-times-most-famous-tweet-which-is-10-years-old-today/
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phillco
It's so weird to think that Twitter used to be insignificant enough that a
random software engineer could just tweet to the NY Time's social media
account at will, without going through all the hoops of a social media team.
Kudos to them for keeping it up, it's a great tweet.

~~~
Apocryphon
Sorta like when the web first got started and domain names weren't in the
public imagination yet:

[https://www.wired.com/2005/08/tech/](https://www.wired.com/2005/08/tech/)

~~~
rmason
I remember in the early days of the web an interviewer asked Ted Turner about
the web and whether there would ever be a cnn.com. He went off on a rant about
the web being I think a fad and that the answer would always be a no.

Two days later in August 1995 CNN Interactive launched at cnn.com. Press
wanted to know if Turner had changed his mind. Guy in charge of the site said
probably no but Ted doesn't understand the net at all. It was decided this was
a slam dunk so we went ahead and launched it without telling him.

Turner never understood the Internet and it came back to bite him big time
when after merging with Time-Warner in 1996 he went ahead with the others on
the board in 1999 and bought AOL. In the crash that followed he proceeded to
lose about three quarters of his net worth.

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hbosch
Link is giving me a massive, jumbled page of mixed characters suggesting
something is broken.

If you're seeing what I'm seeing, here is a Google Cache version:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WUGP7Ho...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WUGP7HoVukwJ:www.niemanlab.org/2017/03/word-
up-this-is-the-story-behind-the-new-york-times-most-famous-tweet-which-
is-10-years-old-today/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

~~~
tompic823
Do you have uBlock origin installed?

------
TorKlingberg
The New York Times has always been good at digital things. They have a decent
API and have digitized a lot of historical articles from the 20th century.

~~~
danso
Speaking of their API, a recently new one is the Archive API (I only noticed
it this past year), which makes it much easier to download all of their
article metadata. It used to be you had to paginate through their articles
API, which was limited in its number of paginated results. Now you can get all
of the articles and their metadata for any given year and month, which makes
it a great place for practicing data mining and other classification
techniques.

[https://developer.nytimes.com/archive_api.json#/README](https://developer.nytimes.com/archive_api.json#/README)

Example result for 2016-11 (around 18mb in size):

[http://stash.compciv.org/2017/nytimes-
archive-2016-11.json](http://stash.compciv.org/2017/nytimes-
archive-2016-11.json)

------
shortsightedsid
It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.

\- Grace Hopper

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officelineback
That is hilarious. The humblebrag one was pretty good, too.

------
mudil
CIA's first tweet was great:

"We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet."

~~~
jlewis7272
"but we are listening..."

~~~
cmdrfred
The CIA are cool now guys stop it!

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NamTaf
If this isn't a perfect example of how your "hacky prototype" will never be
replaced with a fully developed solution until absolutely necessary, I don't
know what is.

------
ouid
Alternatively, twitter is more than ten years old.

~~~
mikeevans
Yesterday was the 11th anniversary of the first Tweet:
[https://twitter.com/jack/status/20](https://twitter.com/jack/status/20)

------
glibgil
And like so many things from ten years ago... cringe

