Sibling rivers, May–September 2009
The same table, pointed at other people
The top-100 table was the first river. By mid-May 2009 it had siblings on their own subdomains, each built the same way but fed by a different list of accounts. Some followed an institution. Two followed a place.
The New York Times
Reporters, editors and section feeds of one newspaper, read as a single stream.
twitter.100twt.com · 33 accountsThe people of Twitter
The company's own staff, from the founders down, tweeting about their work and their days.
gang.100twt.com · 10 accountsThe Gillmor Gang
The panel of a technology talk show, followed as a group between episodes.
berkeley.100twt.com · 31 accountsBerkeley
A city's accounts in one table: a news feed, a campus, a food truck, neighbors.
twincities.100twt.com · 37 accountsThe Twin Cities
Minneapolis and St. Paul on one page, heavy on sports and local news.
Lists before lists
Twitter didn't offer its own Lists feature until late 2009. Before that, the only timeline most people saw was the one built from the accounts they followed themselves. If you wanted to read what a newsroom or a city was saying, you had to follow every account in it and accept that they'd be mixed into everything else.
A river solved that from the outside. Someone picked the accounts, a script polled them, and the result was a public page that anyone could open without an account of their own. Nothing was ranked. The newest tweet went on top and the oldest fell off the bottom.
The chart below shows how different the rivers were in scale. Each dot is one account in a capture, placed by its follower count. The short vertical bar marks the median. The top 100 lived in the hundreds of thousands and millions. The city rivers lived in the hundreds.