Twitscoop

» see twitscoop.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Twitter arrived late in Turkey. In May 2009, when Twitscoop had 500,000 people watching its tag cloud, the Turkish internet still ran on forums and on MSN, and Twitter here was a thin layer of journalists and early adopters talking mostly to each other. The loud years came after 2011. By then Twitscoop had already passed its own high water mark, so this is a tool I could have used and never did, for the dull reason that its best year landed before the thing it measured had reached me.

Philippe Breuils launched it in May 2008 under a French company called Lollicode SARL. The idea was narrow and it was good. Rather than count retweets, which were easy to game and full of automated noise, Twitscoop read the whole public timeline, discarded the non-English and the spam, and ranked each remaining word by how often it was appearing against how often it normally appeared. VentureBeat put it plainly in May 2009: the word Twitter gets typed constantly, so unless it is being typed more than usual, it never enters the cloud at all. Deviation from baseline rather than raw volume.

What you got for that was an activity graph, something called the BuzzOmeter, and a tag cloud where hotter words were simply bigger. A plain Twitter client sat alongside it so you could reply to whatever you had just found. The whole site was about 6.7 KB of markup, which tells you how little machinery it took to do something nobody else was doing.

Then it stops. The Internet Archive holds dense captures of twitscoop.com for five straight years at several a month. The last one that is actually Twitscoop is 2 November 2013, with the Activity Graph and the BuzzOmeter still in the page. After that the crawl goes silent until the summer of 2016, which is what happens when there is nothing left at an address to fetch.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ who was leaning on it ~

Twitscoop published an API, and TweetDeck pointed its trend column at it. Stop on that for a second. For a stretch of 2009 and 2010, the Twitter client sitting on half the power users' desktops got its sense of what was happening from one man's word counter in France, and almost nobody using TweetDeck knew the name of the thing feeding it.

Newspapers used it the same way, as instrumentation. The Telegraph measured the spread of its own MPs' expenses investigation on Twitscoop in May 2009, then reached for it again to reconstruct the minute-by-minute shape of the Amsterdam plane crash. TechCrunch used it on 14 May 2009 to watch Google fall over. In all three cases Twitscoop supplied the measurement and somebody else's byline carried the story.

~ the address after ~

By December 2016 the domain was serving a page titled "Twitscoop - Android Apps for PC and APK", an affiliate app-download site that kept the old brand in its og:site_name tag because that was the traffic it was farming. In December 2018 it degraded further, to a bare Apache "Index of /" listing. From 2019 it settled into a generic "Download Apps and Games for PC" template and held that pose for seven more years, serving clean 200s the whole time, right up to a capture on 4 February 2026. On 6 October 2026 it finally answered 410 Gone, which is still what it answers today.

~ what the article still says ~

English Wikipedia describes Twitscoop in the present tense and sets current_status to Online. It has been tagged as an orphan since June 2016, meaning no other article links to it, which is the condition a page ends up in when the thing it describes stops producing anything to link about. The article has been thirteen years out of date without anyone correcting it.

A zombie infobox is why anybody found this corpse at all. A Wikidata query for products with a live official website and no recorded death date put twitscoop.com in a list of 3,375 hostnames, and the hostname did not answer. A dead site with an article that insists it is alive is the cheapest death to find and the hardest to date.

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