6 ms·

Internal status email: Twitter at 3 months old. 160 Users & 100 Tweets per day

104 points by rabble 16y ago

foca 16y ago
"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 http://blog.twitter.com/2011/03/numbers.html)
- Blocks8 16y ago
  Loved that! It's great to see that even great big things start small.
romeda 16y ago
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.
- acconrad 16y ago
  That's actually kind of a relief, especially considering all the news you hear about 10000 users in 72 hours, it seems like if you don't explode onto the scene you're a failure.
- cookiecaper 16y ago
  Personally 160 users sounds like a lot to me. None of the unfunded services I've bootstrapped had reached that.
  - rabble 16y ago
    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.
- d_r 16y ago
  "Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success." -Biz Stone (co-founder of Twitter) http://www.bizstone.com/2010/09/timing-lessons.html http://www.bizstone.com/2010/09/timing-lessons.html
- rdouble 16y ago
  Unless your startup is Facebook.
RobMcCullough 16y ago
Link is dead or down, I can't wait to read this!
- rabble 16y ago
  Not sure what happened, sshing in to the server and poking around.
  - gokhan 16y ago
    The subject line is so tempting, I upvoted while waiting for you:)
  - RobMcCullough 16y ago
    Thanks! G'Luck
  - rabble 16y ago
    The hard drive filled up and mysql corrupted a table. It's fixed now.
  - jedsmith 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      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.
dualboot 16y ago
Google Cache Link : 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 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy&#38...
- RobMcCullough 16y ago
  How did you find that? I found the original article in Google but there was no link to a cached version.
  - dualboot 16y ago
    Take the URL you're trying to pull up and search for cache:<target URL here>
    - Natsu 16y ago
      In Firefox, you can also bookmark the URL http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:%s 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 16y ago
        Very cool! Thanks for the replies, good to know.
amitparikh 16y ago
I'll be the first to say... Thank you for putting the vowels back in your name. "Twttr" looks horrible.
- jeremymcanally 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    It was always PRONOUNCED twitter, but we did write it twttr, everywhere, back in the day.
    - jeremymcanally 16y ago
      Right, that's what I meant. :)
      - rabble 16y ago
        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.
    - amitparikh 16y ago
      but be honest, how many people did you show that to that said, "what's Twatter?"
- technomancy 16y ago
  They probably couldn't afford twitter.com back in the day.
  - rabble 16y ago
    Ev had a bundle of pre-IPO google stock, so he could afford it. Also Odeo stil had cash in the bank, but he didn't want to buy the vowels until he was sure there was something to the idea. Obvious was supposed to be a company which hacked out many ideas, a kind of incubator. The problem was one of the first batches of ideas turned in to a major run away success.
blhack 16y ago
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 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)
- notyourwork 16y ago
  Care to provide a bit more on thingist? I clicked through and at first glance have a few ideas of what it is but not totally sure what I would use it for. Without an about page or any precursor I would not sign up for something on a whim. Interested in checking it out though! Also side note: The bottom pagination links do not work for me. I can click next page and get next page but if I select a number be it 2, 3, or 75 I get an empty page?
  - blhack 16y ago
    Sure :) Thingist is kindof like status updates, but with more context (and more available space [You can include a description of why you're posting it). Instead of a big bucket called "status", you separate things into different lists. For instance, I have a list called "Good Bars in Phoenix" (http://thingist.com/t/list/65/ http://thingist.com/t/list/65/) or a list called "Adventures in Nerdery", which is mostly projects I'm working on (http://thingist.com/t/list/139/ http://thingist.com/t/list/139/) There are some global lists like "songs I like" (which get added to people by default when they register) (http://thingist.com/t/global/38/ http://thingist.com/t/global/38/) The example for a use case I always use is finding music that you've posted into the internet. I've been posing songs I like into facebook for 5 years, but as far as I know there isn't a simple way of pulling them back out. Thingist [tries to] solve that. But it's more than just status, at least it's a new approach to it. Somebody joined a few days ago, and started posting "things on the menu at a nerd themed restaurant". This resulted in neat sort-of back and forth between us: ( http://thingist.com/t/global/2944/ http://thingist.com/t/global/2944/) (also: fixed the pagination buttons, oops)
- l0c0b0x 16y ago
budu3 16y ago
Interesting how he signs of with "keep twttring". I that email was written today it would have been "keep tweeting".
- rabble 16y ago
  Nobody liked the word tweet. It was a term created by the user community, and only slowly accepted by the team.
c2 16y ago
"Older" hackers take note: Biz Stone, Evan Williams: 30+ founders club. They were both over thirty when twitter started.
- rabble 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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.
techsupporter 16y ago
For nostalgia's sake (if it's suitable to reveal), what was the original number that Twitter used?
- rabble 16y ago
  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.
bane 16y ago
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.

104 points by rabble 16y ago

foca 16y ago

"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 http://blog.twitter.com/2011/03/numbers.html)

Blocks8 16y ago
Loved that! It's great to see that even great big things start small.

romeda 16y ago

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.

acconrad 16y ago
That's actually kind of a relief, especially considering all the news you hear about 10000 users in 72 hours, it seems like if you don't explode onto the scene you're a failure.
cookiecaper 16y ago
Personally 160 users sounds like a lot to me. None of the unfunded services I've bootstrapped had reached that.
- rabble 16y ago
  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.
d_r 16y ago
"Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success." -Biz Stone (co-founder of Twitter) http://www.bizstone.com/2010/09/timing-lessons.html http://www.bizstone.com/2010/09/timing-lessons.html
rdouble 16y ago
Unless your startup is Facebook.

RobMcCullough 16y ago

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

rabble 16y ago
Not sure what happened, sshing in to the server and poking around.
- gokhan 16y ago
  The subject line is so tempting, I upvoted while waiting for you:)
- RobMcCullough 16y ago
  Thanks! G'Luck
- rabble 16y ago
  The hard drive filled up and mysql corrupted a table. It's fixed now.
- jedsmith 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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.

dualboot 16y ago

Google Cache Link : 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 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy&#38...

RobMcCullough 16y ago
How did you find that? I found the original article in Google but there was no link to a cached version.
- dualboot 16y ago
  Take the URL you're trying to pull up and search for cache:<target URL here>
  - Natsu 16y ago
    In Firefox, you can also bookmark the URL http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:%s 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 16y ago
      Very cool! Thanks for the replies, good to know.

amitparikh 16y ago

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

jeremymcanally 16y ago
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 16y ago
  It was always PRONOUNCED twitter, but we did write it twttr, everywhere, back in the day.
  - jeremymcanally 16y ago
    Right, that's what I meant. :)
    - rabble 16y ago
      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.
  - amitparikh 16y ago
    but be honest, how many people did you show that to that said, "what's Twatter?"
technomancy 16y ago
They probably couldn't afford twitter.com back in the day.
- rabble 16y ago
  Ev had a bundle of pre-IPO google stock, so he could afford it. Also Odeo stil had cash in the bank, but he didn't want to buy the vowels until he was sure there was something to the idea. Obvious was supposed to be a company which hacked out many ideas, a kind of incubator. The problem was one of the first batches of ideas turned in to a major run away success.

blhack 16y ago

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 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)

notyourwork 16y ago
Care to provide a bit more on thingist? I clicked through and at first glance have a few ideas of what it is but not totally sure what I would use it for. Without an about page or any precursor I would not sign up for something on a whim. Interested in checking it out though! Also side note: The bottom pagination links do not work for me. I can click next page and get next page but if I select a number be it 2, 3, or 75 I get an empty page?
- blhack 16y ago
  Sure :) Thingist is kindof like status updates, but with more context (and more available space [You can include a description of why you're posting it). Instead of a big bucket called "status", you separate things into different lists. For instance, I have a list called "Good Bars in Phoenix" (http://thingist.com/t/list/65/ http://thingist.com/t/list/65/) or a list called "Adventures in Nerdery", which is mostly projects I'm working on (http://thingist.com/t/list/139/ http://thingist.com/t/list/139/) There are some global lists like "songs I like" (which get added to people by default when they register) (http://thingist.com/t/global/38/ http://thingist.com/t/global/38/) The example for a use case I always use is finding music that you've posted into the internet. I've been posing songs I like into facebook for 5 years, but as far as I know there isn't a simple way of pulling them back out. Thingist [tries to] solve that. But it's more than just status, at least it's a new approach to it. Somebody joined a few days ago, and started posting "things on the menu at a nerd themed restaurant". This resulted in neat sort-of back and forth between us: ( http://thingist.com/t/global/2944/ http://thingist.com/t/global/2944/) (also: fixed the pagination buttons, oops)
l0c0b0x 16y ago

budu3 16y ago

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

rabble 16y ago
Nobody liked the word tweet. It was a term created by the user community, and only slowly accepted by the team.

c2 16y ago

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

rabble 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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.

techsupporter 16y ago

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

rabble 16y ago
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.

bane 16y ago

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.