“What was the first Twitter tweet?”

Good question. In fact, I get asked about it all the time.

Twitter’s first tweet was posted by Twitter Founder, Jack Dorsey @jack on March 21, 2006.
https://twitter.com/#!/jack/status/20

Shortly afterward, Jack began inviting coworkers — and the rest is history.
https://twitter.com/#!/jack/status/29

If you look at Jacks first tweet on Twitter, you’ll notice the status id number was “20”. Until July 2009, status update IDs were sequential. Then, on September 21, 2010, Twitter implemented their Snowflake update — a Tweet ID generation service which changed the status ID numbers to be composed of a timestamp, a worker number, and a sequence number.

I’m sure, from a technical standpoint, this made a lot of sense internally. But by changing the status IDs to be something other sequentially numbered, it suddenly made a difficult task of figuring out the total number of tweets.

Check out the Twitter Clock for our real-time Twitter statistics.