Twitterfall

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

~ the eulogy ~

David Somers and Tom Brearley were studying computer science at the University of York when they put Twitterfall online in January 2009. It read Twitter's public search, took the trending terms off the search page, and rendered the results as a column of tweets falling continuously down your screen. There was no account to make and nothing to configure beyond the search term. You left it running and watched a subject happen in real time.

Twitter in early 2009 was two years old and had just become a news instrument almost by accident, through the Mumbai attacks in November 2008 and the airliner that landed in the Hudson that January. Editors could see that something was there but had no way to look at it. Twitterfall was the first widely used answer, and it was built by undergraduates as what the pair themselves called a fun little project.

By February 2009 the Daily Telegraph was projecting it onto a screen in its own newsroom so reporters could watch breaking news arrive. In May, ITV ran a Twitterfall stream on its site through the FA Cup final. In June it was how a lot of people outside Iran followed the election protests, hashtag by hashtag, as the story outran the wire services. For a stretch of about eighteen months this was the standard way to put Twitter on a wall.

Mine was never one of the walls. Twitterfall's natural home was a newsroom projector or a conference backchannel screen, and it was always more useful to a room than to a person. What I did see, from a long way outside the British media that adopted it, was what happened the first time somebody pointed it at a live political event without a moderator in the loop.

~ the dossier ~

~ the budget stream ~

In April 2009 the Telegraph put an unmoderated Twitterfall stream of the UK budget coverage directly on its own website, filtered by hashtag. Twitter users did what anybody could have predicted and flooded the hashtag, and the newspaper spent the afternoon publishing abuse on its own politics pages. The Guardian wrote it up under the headline "Twitterfall becomes TwitterFAIL for Telegraph's budget coverage".

Nothing was wrong with the software. It did precisely what it said: show every tweet matching this term, in order, as they come. The lesson the industry took fifteen years to fully absorb was that an unfiltered live feed on a publisher's own page makes the publisher responsible for strangers.

~ fourteen years of api ~

The remarkable thing about Twitterfall is not that it died, it is that it lasted. Twitter deprecated API version 1 in 2013, throttled public search, and spent the rest of the decade squeezing every independent client it had. Twitterfall survived all of it, run by two people under a small partnership called Protane LLP, long after the trend-wall category it invented had been absorbed into official tooling.

~ the last pour ~

In January 2023, three months after the ownership change, Twitter cut off third-party client access without warning anybody, and Twitterfall's key stopped working along with everything else. The site is still served today and the homepage is now its own obituary. It explains that Twitter deactivated Twitterfall's ability to access Twitter, that the founders were not expecting it to be reinstated, and it thanks everyone who used the app over the last fourteen years.

The sign-off is one line, with both founders' Twitter handles under it: "Thank you, and good night."

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