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

anarchogeek.com

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

#21

Post by blhack »

l0c0b0x wrote: post #17
blhack wrote: post #15

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)

How about telling us (and everyone) what thingist helps us with. That'd help!

This is an excellent point. "Create an about page" is at the top of my list of things to do as soon as I get off of work.

I made this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1rOJJWyU2s

but it was wayyyy too long.

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

#22

Post by cookiecaper »

romeda wrote: post #3

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.

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

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

#23

Post by rabble »

jeremymcanally wrote: post #20
amitparikh wrote: post #9

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

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. :)

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

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

#24

Post by rabble »

jedsmith wrote: post #13
rabble wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

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.

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

#25

Post by makeee »

blhack wrote: post #15

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)

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.

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

#26

Post by Natsu »

dualboot wrote: post #14
RobMcCullough wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Take the URL you're trying to pull up and search for cache:

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 and it will go straight to a search for the cache of that.

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

#27

Post by blhack »

makeee wrote: post #25
blhack wrote: post #15

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)

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…

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?)

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

#28

Post by RobMcCullough »

Natsu wrote: post #26
dualboot wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take the URL you're trying to pull up and search for cache:

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 and it will go straight to a search for the cache of that.

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

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

#29

Post by jeremymcanally »

rabble wrote: post #23
jeremymcanally wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

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

Right, that's what I meant. :)

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

#30

Post by iamcalledrob »

blhack wrote: post #21
l0c0b0x wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about telling us (and everyone) what thingist helps us with. That'd help!

This is an excellent point. "Create an about page" is at the top of my list of things to do as soon as I get off of work. I made this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1rOJJWyU2s but it was wayyyy too long.

No – don't make an about page. Well sure, make one, but it probably won't help a great deal.

You need to be showing people what it's about, the instant they visit your site.

I saw your page, thought "hmm, not quite sure what this is" and left. I'm not going to stick around to read an about page.

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