Twitter’s Early Adopters

just setting up my twttr

— jack (@jack) March 21, 2006

You’ll be seeing that tweet a lot over the next few days. It’s the first ever public tweet that was posted to the service we now know as Twitter. And it was sent ten years ago by Jack Dorsey, one of Twitter’s founders.

Today, Twitter has over a hundred million users, who send 340 million tweets a day (those numbers are almost certainly out of date already) but I thought it would be interesting to look back and look at Twitter’s earliest users.

Every Twitter user has a user ID. That’s an integer which uniquely identifies them to the system. This is a simple incrementing counter[1]. You can use a site like MyTwitterID to get anyone’s ID given their Twitter username. It’s worth noting that you can change your username, but your ID is fixed. When I registered a new account last week, I got an ID that was eighteen digits long. But back in 2006, IDs were far shorter. Jack’s ID, for example, is 12. That’s the lowest currently active ID on the system. I assume that the earlier numbers were used for test accounts.

Using the Twitter API you can write a program that will give you details of a user from their ID. Yesterday I wrote a simple program to get the details of the first 100,000 Twitter users (the code is available on Github). The results from running the program are online. That’s a list of all of the currently active Twitter users with an ID less than 100,000.

The first thing you’ll notice is that there are far fewer than you might expect. The API only returns details on currently active users. So anyone who has closed their account won’t be listed. I expected that perhaps 20-25% of accounts might fall into that category, but it was much higher than that.

There are 12,435 users in the file. That means that 87,500 of the first 100,000 Twitter accounts are no longer active. That was such a surprise to me that I assumed there was a bug in my program. But I can’t find one. It really looks like almost 90% of the early Twitter users are no longer using the service.

The dates that the account were created range from Jack‘s on 21st March 2006 to Jeremy Hulette (ID 99983 – the closest we have to 100,000) exactly nine months later on 21st December 2006.  I guess you could get a good visualisation of Twitter’s early growth by plotting ID against creation date – but I’ll leave that to someone else.

My file also contains location. But it’s important to note that I’m getting the location that is currently associated with that account – not the original location (I wonder if Twitter still have that information). I know a large number of people who were in London when they joined Twitter by who are now in San Francisco, so any conclusions you draw from the location field are necessarily sketchy. But bearing that in mind, here are some “firsts”.

• First non-Californian: rabble (ID 22, PDX & MVD)
• First non-America: florian (ID 38, Berlin)
• First Brit: blaine (ID 246, London)

That last one seems a little high to me. I might have missed someone earlier who didn’t put “UK” in their location.

So who’s on the list? Is there anyone famous? Not that I’ve seen yet. Oh, there are well-known geeks on the list. But no-one you’d describe as a celebrity. No musicians, no actors, no politicians, no footballers or athletes. I may have missed someone – please let me know if you spot anyone.

Oh, and I’m on the list. I’m at number 14753. I signed up (as @davorg) at 11:30 on Wednesday 22nd November 2006. I suspect I’m one of the first thousand or so Brits on the list – but it’s hard to be sure of that.

Anyway, happy birthday to Twitter. I hope that someone finds this data interesting. Let me know what you find.

[1] Actually, there’s a good chance that this is no longer the case – but it was certainly true back in 2006.