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.
Unless your startup is Facebook.
Internal status email: Twitter at 3 months old. 160 Users & 100 Tweets per day
41–50 of 50 posts
Re: Internal status email: Twitter at 3 months old. 160 Users & 100 Tweets per day
#42"Older" hackers take note: Biz Stone, Evan Williams: 30+ founders club. They were both over thirty when twitter started.
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.
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.
Re: Internal status email: Twitter at 3 months old. 160 Users & 100 Tweets per day
#43For nostalgia's sake (if it's suitable to reveal), what was the original number that Twitter used?
Re: Internal status email: Twitter at 3 months old. 160 Users & 100 Tweets per day
#44"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 )
Loved that! It's great to see that even great big things start small.
Re: Internal status email: Twitter at 3 months old. 160 Users & 100 Tweets per day
#45Earlier 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.
but be honest, how many people did you show that to that said, "what's Twatter?"
Re: Internal status email: Twitter at 3 months old. 160 Users & 100 Tweets per day
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was always PRONOUNCED twitter, but we did write it twttr, everywhere, back in the day.
Right, that's what I meant. :)
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.
Re: Internal status email: Twitter at 3 months old. 160 Users & 100 Tweets per day
#47For nostalgia's sake (if it's suitable to reveal), what was the original number that Twitter used?
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.
Re: Internal status email: Twitter at 3 months old. 160 Users & 100 Tweets per day
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (As a sidenote: can I just point out that facebook's API is freaking awesome?) No you may not. Facebooks API is horrible. I was just implementing the like buttons on my site and realized that they have to be iframes (even the FBXML or whatever its called creates iframes). This turns out a bit ridiculous on pages such as yours (if you put them on the feed page) and mine where you Twitter on the other hand allows you…
Well, you could write your own, but you'd have to have users authenticate the application. In my opinion, this isn't much different than twitter, since both actions would require two clicks: facebook: click your custom widget -> facebook prompt -> perform action twitter: click your custom widget -> twitter prompt -> perform action (Or just do like I do, and change the size of the iframe to 450x20)
as far as i'm aware, you can't really write your own. I was watching the network traffic for a submit and it was pretty ridiculous how many transactions it did when you clicked "like" (about 4 if i remember correctly). Having the users authenticate the action would actually be good for sites like mine but facebook doesn't seem to provide that option.
Re: Internal status email: Twitter at 3 months old. 160 Users & 100 Tweets per day
#49Having 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.
Re: Internal status email: Twitter at 3 months old. 160 Users & 100 Tweets per day
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How about a list of reasons why thingist is awesome, or a list of what it can do that will solve or fill some need, promoted to the front page?