The New York Times’ most famous tweet is ten years old | Hacker News Reader

The New York Times’ most famous tweet is ten years old

niemanlab.org

164 pointsuptown19 comments

It's so weird to think that Twitter used to be insignificant enough that a random software engineer could just tweet to the NY Time's social media account at will, without going through all the hoops of a social media team. Kudos to them for keeping it up, it's a great tweet.

Sorta like when the web first got started and domain names weren't in the public imagination yet:

https://www.wired.com/2005/08/tech/

I remember in the early days of the web an interviewer asked Ted Turner about the web and whether there would ever be a cnn.com. He went off on a rant about the web being I think a fad and that the answer would always be a no.

Two days later in August 1995 CNN Interactive launched at cnn.com. Press wanted to know if Turner had changed his mind. Guy in charge of the site said probably no but Ted doesn't understand the net at all. It was decided this was a slam dunk so we went ahead and launched it without telling him.

Turner never understood the Internet and it came back to bite him big time when after merging with Time-Warner in 1996 he went ahead with the others on the board in 1999 and bought AOL. In the crash that followed he proceeded to lose about three quarters of his net worth.

It's a bit less weird when you consider the fact that the random software engineer is the person who set up the NYT's social media account.

Link is giving me a massive, jumbled page of mixed characters suggesting something is broken.

If you're seeing what I'm seeing, here is a Google Cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WUGP7Ho...

Do you have uBlock origin installed?

The New York Times has always been good at digital things. They have a decent API and have digitized a lot of historical articles from the 20th century.

And they have a decent tech interview process!

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/jobs/nyt-news-appli...

I've tried using their API and the one for comments is not reliable. It typically errors out (abruptly) when you're retrieving comments for an article. Posts/comments to their developer forum also typically goes unanswered for months and sometimes never.

Speaking of their API, a recently new one is the Archive API (I only noticed it this past year), which makes it much easier to download all of their article metadata. It used to be you had to paginate through their articles API, which was limited in its number of paginated results. Now you can get all of the articles and their metadata for any given year and month, which makes it a great place for practicing data mining and other classification techniques.

https://developer.nytimes.com/archive_api.json#/README

Example result for 2016-11 (around 18mb in size):

http://stash.compciv.org/2017/nytimes-archive-2016-11.json

It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.

- Grace Hopper

That is hilarious. The humblebrag one was pretty good, too.

CIA's first tweet was great:

"We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet."

"but we are listening..."

The CIA are cool now guys stop it!

If this isn't a perfect example of how your "hacky prototype" will never be replaced with a fully developed solution until absolutely necessary, I don't know what is.

Alternatively, twitter is more than ten years old.

Yesterday was the 11th anniversary of the first Tweet: https://twitter.com/jack/status/20

And like so many things from ten years ago... cringe

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