100twt.com

twitter.100twt.com · captured May 19, 2009

The people of Twitter

The company's own staff, from the founders down, tweeting about their work and their days.

As the page put it5/19/09; 11:59:28 AM Pacific

What are the people of Twitter twittering about?

"What are the people of Twitter twittering about?" The question was literal. This river followed the company's staff, from the three co-founders in the top 100 down to engineers with a couple of thousand followers. The capture from May 19, 2009 holds 33 accounts in its 100 tweets, reaching back about eighteen and a half hours by the clock times on the page.

It is a rare view of a company talking to itself in public. Founders and engineers posted side by side, about lunch, about code, about one another's tweets. On the main 100twt table the same founders appear among the celebrities and news organizations, because in 2009 the people who built Twitter were still among its most-followed users.

The Twitter river was also the one that kept a daily archive. The Internet Archive saved a page for each day from May 15 to May 31, 2009 (May 25 is missing), and directory listings for June through October 2009. The June folder lists a page for every day from the 1st to the 30th.

Scale

101001K10K100K1M10MTop 100, Nov 2Twitter
Followers per account in this river's capture, against the top-100 table of November 2, 2009. Log scale; the bar marks the median.