To answer that question I created a visual history of Twitter's growth, feeding data from Dharmesh Shah ( developer of TwitterGrader.com ) into OpenHeatMap to produce an animated visualization of the service's growth, along with information on the earliest users for each region. That gave a broad overview of the spread of the network, but I also did some independent research on user numbers in the first few months, and approached some of those early users to discover exactly what made them sign up to the service.
2006
2007
2008
2009
How did Twitter grow in the early days?
Back in the dark days of 2006, Twitter was just another tech startup competing for attention, so how did it pick up those vital first users? Happily, the service initially gave new users sequential id numbers, so @biz was 13, @noah is 14, and so on. This makes it possible to walk through the first few thousand ids in using the API and reconstruct when every person joined, and so how many users there were at any point in time. For the geekily inclined, here's some notes on my methodology and code to help you reproduce my results .
This is the day-by-day chart for the initial launch. The first public mention of the service I can find is on Evan William's blog late on July 13th , but you can see that even on the 12th there was a mini-boom in registrations. Then Om Malik's post on the 15th really pushed it over the top, with more than 250 people signing up the next day. What I find fascinating is that there were less than 600 people on the service at that point, so it was a very prescient plug. Encouraging for those of us with our own startups is the flattening of the growth curve after the initial spike from the publicity - it's always painful to go through the come-down after the adrenaline boost of a rush of visitors.
What's clear from these monthly charts is that the service truly was viral, even in its early days. As it got more users, they drove more users, giving you the rocketing curve every entrepreneur dreams of. It looks like a service that users loved and shared with their friends, instead of one where traffic is driven by high-profile articles and hype.
How did the very first users discover Twitter?
I asked some of the earliest adopters how they first found the service and why they started using it.
@billg ran across Om's blog post, was working on some wristwatch technology that was a perfect fit for the 140 character messages and so leapt at the chance to try it out
@neha " learned about twitter very early because I worked at Google when the Blogger guys did ... I absolutely adore new social technologies and pretty much sign up for everything, so I signed up for twitter. Also, Ev and Biz are interesting guys, and are fun to follow! ... during the first few years it had that select-community feel -- like Orkut when Google first launched it, or FriendFeed. The people on the site were friends of friends of the creators, and so it was a very SF-centric tech community. It was very interesting to hear what these people had to say! High signal to noise ratio "
A recurring theme is the power of that initial publicity in driving the early users, and the feeling that it was a way to connect with an interesting group of people. Evan's high-profile and Om's endorsement must have been a big help in building that sort of buzz.
The SXSW explosion
In March 2007 Twitter won the top award at South-by-Southwest, and that was when the service really started getting attention. I wanted to see how that was reflected in user growth, so I looked at how a few cities changed between December 2006 and March 2007. Austin had a massive growth spurt, from 61 to 402 users in three months, but what's interesting is that almost every other town also went through a similar rise, with Los Angeles going from 88 to 474 twitterers, and Boise jumping from 6 to 30. That roughly five-fold increase over the 3 months was remarkably evenly spread.The next three months were less explosive, but the pattern was still very consistent across the country. By June 2007 Austin had 671 users, LA 994 and Boise 53, and most cities had roughly doubled.
The Pioneers
Here's a list of the earliest Twitter users we could find for some major US cities. Everyone here joined before February 2007 and the SXSW boom, so they can claim bragging rights as the true pioneers.
Austin, TX - Paul Terry Walhus
Dallas, TX - Bill Geiser
Memphis, TN - Mark Taylor
Salt Lake City, UT - Christian Harrison
Palo Alto, CA - Ted Wang
San Jose, CA - Hook
Santa Monica, CA - Jenny Cool
San Francisco, CA - Biz Stone
Portland, OR - Rael Dornfest
Seattle, WA - Asa Bass
And here's the first twenty users overall:
1 - Biz Stone
2 - noah glass
3 - crystal
4 - Jeremy
5 - Tony Stubblebine
6 - Adam Rugel
7 - Evan Williams
8 - Dom Sagolla
9 - rabble
10 - Tim Roberts
11 - meredith
12 - rayreadyray
13 - ariel
14 - Florian
15 - drx
16 - kellan
17 - Hook
18 - sara
19 - Kati
20 - Sarah Milstein
I'd also never thought of Twitter as an aspirational service, but Neha nailed the atmosphere of the early days. There was an air of exclusivity, of access to an interesting group of Valley rockstars, that gave people a reason to check it out. This feels a lot like the way that Facebook started at Ivy League colleges and then opened up progressively to lower-status groups with the promise of mixing with a 'better class' of people. That might explain why companies like Google have such a hard time launching similar services, catering to the masses they can't pretend they're exclusive, but it bodes well for Quora's approach.
The reality of its rapid adoption all over the country is hard to square with its image as an exclusive Valley club, but maybe that contradiction is the sign of exquisite marketing. Apple gives their users that same sensation of belonging to an elite, even as they sell products in malls across the country. Twitter tapped into people whose dreams were in Silicon Valley, wherever they were in the world.
Inbound Marketing Blog Feed
richard gregory 7:20 PM on August 26, 2010
This is interesting but would be genuinely more so in a world context. How did Twitter spread in Europe, the Middle East, Africa? What about war and disaster zones, where it's been a major communication force?
intransition 7:21 PM on August 26, 2010
Hunh--kinda lines up with the unemployment maps for the same years...so, not sure it's all "marketing" chatter, yanno?
Narendra 7:35 PM on August 26, 2010
I think another important sustaining factor were early Web2.0 companies that were first in seeing the value of the twitter service as a communication tool and were spreading the service to highly connected communities.
http://gigaom.com/2007/01/22/twitter-goes-corporate/
Nick Bilton 12:14 AM on August 27, 2010
Curious, wasn't Jack the first user? He sent the first Tweet, if I remember correctly: http://twitter.com/jack/status/20
Jack's user ID is also 13, but you have rayreadyray as user 13?
Matthew Simmons 5:34 AM on August 27, 2010
Interesting facts - certainly from my perspective in B2B marketing, it was driven by activity amongst the the thought leaders in the business networking sites - mainly as a marketing tool.
Steve Jackson 6:53 AM on August 27, 2010
Yet more evidence that Americans like to ignore the first W in WWW.
Susanna King 8:56 AM on August 27, 2010
I think you're right to focus on the SXSW influence. I joined in Jan. 2007, mainly to keep in touch with others I'd met at a previous conference, people from FL, CO, and NC. And when I discovered I could see what leaders in the industry were doing on a daily basis, I was hooked.
John R. Sedivy 10:52 AM on August 27, 2010
They say "a picture is worth a thousand words" and that's certainly true here. OpenHeatMap appears to be a powerful communicator of growth patterns. I wonder if going forward if this pattern will repeat itself as other social media emerge and the world continues to flatten. Another interesting point was likening Twitter to Facebook growth - I believe LinkedIn may have had a similar pattern, at least with its origin among thought leaders.
Spencer Wilson 12:26 PM on August 27, 2010
What are the current trends for twitter growth? Is there sign of decline? Is there an up to date article charting ups and downs of social media tools?
Thanks
Robert Scoble 12:38 PM on August 27, 2010
Interesting that I first got on the service in November, 2006. I was about the 13,000th user, so this all rings true to me. I got into it after hearing about it from all the folks you list above, but mostly because @ekai showed it to me and kept bugging me to get onto it.
TheREcoach 1:28 PM on August 27, 2010
That was fun! Thanks for an amazing recap...so glad I found TweetingSince.com as well :-)
Stay Blogging My Friends!
@TheRECoach
amolpatil2k 6:02 PM on August 27, 2010
Can anyone figure out how to prevent Twitter from getting gamed. My suggestion is to put a stop to follower vanity and concentrate on the tweet itself. In a sense, we need to Follow Concepts. If some tweet is about that Concept, it appears in the timeline. Twitter can continue to have Accounts to follow, but also add Concepts to follow. Saved Searches just don't cut it because here the Concepts are Keywords. Searching keywords "Hate ebooks" would show results but might not bring together the group of people who hate ebooks which a Concept might be able to. Or better still, users subscribed to a Concept should have full two-way communication i.e everyone follows everyone else. Then this group can keep fragmenting into smaller groups based on user blocking. If A blocks B, then A remains in group ACD which B remains in group ABCD.
Max 8:40 PM on August 27, 2010
It's odd that you focused on only one country. The internet reaches across the entire globe....and that includes Twitter.
So to look only at America is not realistic or effective in understanding how Twitter spread. Many of those users in America could have been encouraged/introduced to Twitter from a website or email originating in another country.
Observer 11:52 AM on August 28, 2010
I have noticed that when certain people complain about Americans not taking the rest of the world into account and in effect accuse Americans of acting like they are at the center of the universe, it's because those people already know that they themselves are at the center of the universe. In a sense, they are right; there can only be one center of the universe.
Nirwana 2:31 PM on August 28, 2010
i like this bog , i really really gave input from your posting
khadijah 2:38 PM on August 28, 2010
I am very interested in geography at your blog, it's just that until now I hope I will be better
Max 5:05 PM on August 28, 2010
I didn't "accuse Americans of acting like they are at the center of the universe" as you put it.
I simply pointed out that looking at only a part of the world is an ineffective method of determining how and where Twitter spread across the globe, which is the whole point of this article.
The figures stated in this article, eg: 150 000, is a global number of users but then the writer then goes on to look at an isolated region in an effort to determine how that initial number of vital users came about.
If the writer wanted to look only at the spread of Twitter in America then why use global figures?
Michael Durwin 9:16 PM on August 28, 2010
I'd say that the SXSW introduction to so many early adopters and influencers like me helped spread it's growth. We came from all over to SXSW that year and took Twitter back home with us. We told friends, colleagues and clients. Some of us even gave our unborn children Twitter accounts, sucking non-tech friends and family into the service.
Observer 5:42 AM on August 29, 2010
"If the writer wanted to look only at the spread of Twitter in America then why use global figures?"
I know your type. Your only objection is with the word "America" in that sentence.
The article is about how twitter spread in the US before going global. You obviously think others outside the US somehow helped spread twitter around the world, including the US itself. You probably think the same way about the Internet itself.
Like I said, I know your type.
Marcia Forbes 10:50 AM on August 30, 2010
Am beginning to research Twitter (and other social media) use in Jamaica. Your blog is interesting but wanted more about the rest of the world. Having said that, we realize the challenges so hey, I understand.
Jonathan Elliot 8:58 AM on August 31, 2010
You mean twitter is important?
;)
Jonathan from Spritzophrenia
Steve Odom 7:37 AM on September 16, 2010
I have a correction. Not to take anything away from Paul Terry Walhus, but @manton 's twitter id is 897. So I'd say he was the first twitter user in Austin.