Twitter’s amazing stickiness (with a caveat)
I just followed a link to a site that shows the date of the first tweet of 50 early Twitter users. I wondered how many of these early users were still active users, and guessed many would be.
Instead of going and fetching each user’s last tweet by hand, I wrote a little shell script to do all the work:
for name in \
`curl -s http://myfirsttweet.com/oldest.php |
perl -p -e 's,,\nNAME:\t$1\n,g' |
egrep '^NAME:' |
cut -f2 |
uniq`
do
echo $name \
`curl -s "http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/$name.xml?count=1" |
grep created_at |
cut -f2 -d\> |
cut -f1 -d\<`
done
Who wouldn't want to be a (UNIX) programmer!?
And the output, massaged into an HTML table:
| User | Last tweeted on |
| jack | Thu Oct 30 03:41:49 +0000 2008 |
| biz | Thu Oct 30 22:24:12 +0000 2008 |
| Noah | Tue Oct 28 22:56:15 +0000 2008 |
| adam | Thu Oct 30 21:34:56 +0000 2008 |
| tonystubblebine | Fri Oct 31 00:53:38 +0000 2008 |
| dom | Thu Oct 30 20:36:31 +0000 2008 |
| rabble | Fri Oct 31 00:56:28 +0000 2008 |
| kellan | Fri Oct 31 00:32:44 +0000 2008 |
| sarahm | Thu Oct 30 22:45:37 +0000 2008 |
| dunstan | Thu Oct 30 23:59:57 +0000 2008 |
| stevej | Fri Oct 31 00:12:03 +0000 2008 |
| lemonodor | Thu Oct 30 18:21:43 +0000 2008 |
| blaine | Wed Oct 29 23:52:06 +0000 2008 |
| rael | Fri Oct 31 01:02:58 +0000 2008 |
| bob | Fri Oct 31 00:39:18 +0000 2008 |
| graysky | Fri Oct 31 00:23:21 +0000 2008 |
| veen | Thu Oct 30 19:47:40 +0000 2008 |
| dens | Fri Oct 31 00:13:12 +0000 2008 |
| heyitsnoah | Thu Oct 30 20:09:35 +0000 2008 |
| rodbegbie | Thu Oct 30 23:42:39 +0000 2008 |
| astroboy | Thu Oct 30 22:07:50 +0000 2008 |
| alba | Thu Oct 30 16:06:29 +0000 2008 |
| kareem | Thu Oct 30 20:20:14 +0000 2008 |
| gavin | Thu Oct 30 17:48:45 +0000 2008 |
| nick | Fri Oct 31 01:17:29 +0000 2008 |
| psi | Thu Oct 30 20:40:53 +0000 2008 |
| vertex | Fri Oct 31 00:44:09 +0000 2008 |
| mulegirl | Fri Oct 31 00:31:05 +0000 2008 |
| thedaniel | Thu Oct 30 20:00:31 +0000 2008 |
| myles | Thu Oct 30 15:50:31 +0000 2008 |
| mike | ftw Fri Oct 31 00:28:00 +0000 2008 |
| stumblepeach | Thu Oct 30 23:20:06 +0000 2008 |
| bunch | Sat Oct 25 20:46:42 +0000 2008 |
| adamgiles | com Thu Apr 10 17:22:52 +0000 2008 |
| naveen | Thu Oct 30 23:24:23 +0000 2008 |
| nph | Fri Oct 31 01:53:13 +0000 2008 |
| caterina | Tue Oct 28 18:07:32 +0000 2008 |
| rafer | Thu Oct 30 19:23:50 +0000 2008 |
| ML | Thu Oct 30 15:31:47 +0000 2008 |
| brianoberkirch | Thu Oct 30 20:21:43 +0000 2008 |
| joelaz | Thu Oct 30 22:03:59 +0000 2008 |
| arainert | Fri Oct 31 01:18:43 +0000 2008 |
| tony | Sun Oct 26 18:16:02 +0000 2008 |
| brianr | Fri Oct 31 01:57:27 +0000 2008 |
| prash | Tue Oct 28 22:14:24 +0000 2008 |
| danielmorrison | Thu Oct 30 21:37:41 +0000 2008 |
| slack | Fri Oct 31 01:26:08 +0000 2008 |
| mike9r | Thu Oct 30 21:17:29 +0000 2008 |
| monstro | Thu Oct 30 22:28:46 +0000 2008 |
| mat | Fri Oct 31 00:26:22 +0000 2008 |
Wow... look at those dates. Only one of these people has failed to update in the last week!
Here's the caveat. We don't know how many early Twitter users are in the My First Tweet database. The data looks suspicious: there are only 50 Twitter users in a 7 month period? That can't be right. So it's possible the My First Tweet database is built by finding currently active tweeters and then looking back to their first post. If so, my table doesn't say much about stickiness.
But I find it fairly impressive in any case.
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October 31st, 2008 at 12:01 pm
It’s actually being built by people putting in their usernames (or other people’s usernames) at http://myfirsttweet.com …
October 31st, 2008 at 2:01 pm
It’s actually being built by people putting in their usernames (or other people’s usernames) at http://myfirsttweet.com …