TwitterKeys: the first 48 hours…

Written on September 18, 2008 – 3:30 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

A little more than 24 hours ago we posted a bookmarklet here titled TwitterKeys and then all hell broke loose. Here is what happened before we launched it and what has happened since.

On Tuesday evening, just as I was getting ready to go home, I noticed a Tweet on Twitter with a symbol in it which I hadn’t seen before. I copy pasted the symbol and Tweeted it:

Sander (@sandervdv) was working next to me and said “Hey, just open your Character Palette. There are tons of symbols there that you can copy paste”. I immediately did and then replied “Very cool, but kind of hard to find. Can’t we just put them all in a floating browser window so you can easily copy paste them while you are Twittering?”. Sander smiled and said “Sure, and I can even write a Bookmarklet so you can easily access it”.

Then I left the office and went home. At 8pm I opened my laptop and found Sander’s Bookmarklet code in my Inbox. I did a quick test with the help of a few Twitter users to see which symbols would work on all platforms and by 10 pm I uploaded the files, wrote a simple post with the details and launched the whole thing by Twittering the following line:

I ♥ this ☛ http://tinyurl.com/5hpf4f ☺

Immediately I noticed people starting to play with the characters and flowers, comets and stars flying all over Twitter. Within a few hours the Twitter founders found out about TwitterKeys and twittered about it:

Biz Stone (Twitter.com Co-Founder & 16,680 followers):
“Trying out TwitterKeys ☺ which helps you put little icons in your tweets ♥”
http://twitter.com/biz/statuses/923898532

Evan Williams (Twitter.com Co-Founder & 18,650 followers):
“♺ @biz’s post about http://bit.ly/twitterkeys. Neat! ”
http://twitter.com/ev/statuses/923901604

Then other famous people started talking about it:

Howard Rheingold (3,908 followers)
“I ♥ this ☛ http://tinyurl.com/5hpf4f ☺ via @bomega”
http://twitter.com/hrheingold/statuses/923879515

Leo Laporte (55,837 followers)
“I ♥ Twitterkeys. ☛ http://snipurl.com/3r09l ☚”
http://twitter.com/leolaporte/statuses/924264132

So within a few hours these 4 Big Twitter users promoted Twitterkeys to their combined 95,075 followers. The result? About 15,000 unique visitors to the original blog post within 24 hours, 60+ diggs, lots and lots of TwitterKeys on Twitter, reviews on 150+ blogs and a nice spike in RSS Feed subscribers…

Today we launched version 2 of TwitterKeys which displays even more characters. If you haven’t installed it yet do it now:

Drag this link to your browser
bookmarks toolbar: TwitterKeys

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Biz Stone, evan willams, Howard Rheingold, leo laporte, meme, twitter, twitterkeys, viral growth

About the author: Serial entrepreneur and founder of several companies. Current activities include TwitterCounter.com and The Next Web Conference & Blog.

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39 comments/trackbacks to “TwitterKeys: the first 48 hours…”

Sep 19, 2008: TwitterKeys:
[...] Read the full story here:http://thenextweb.org/2008/09/18/twitterkeys-the-first-48-hours/ [...]
Sep 21, 2008: Death, Nalden.net, TwitterKeys, TV, Radio & the Kashmir pouch at Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten
[...] I invented TwitterKeys last week and it became the most popular post on The Next Web blog, ever! Made it to Techcrunch, Digg frontpage and got tweeted by Twitter founders, and several ‘members’ of the top 10 most popular twitter users: http://thenextweb.org/2008/09/.....-48-hours/ [...]

By David Petherick on Sep 18, 2008

♥ it.

[Reply]
By David on Sep 18, 2008

the ✔ choice ☺

[Reply]
By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Sep 18, 2008

Just updated it AGAIN… :-)

There is now a third page with these symbols:

© ® ™ … ∞ ¥ € £ ƒ $ ≤ ≥ ∑ « » ç ∫ µ ◊ ı ∆ Ω ≈ * §
• ¶ ¬ † & ¡ ¿ ø å ∂ œ Æ æ π ß ÷ ‰ √ ≠ % ˚ ˆ ˜ ˘ ¯ ∑ º ª

[Reply]
By Алтайский блогер on Sep 18, 2008

I ♥ Twitter

[Reply]
By Brent on Sep 18, 2008

I have too many favorites/bookmarks to have that toolbar open.

Is there another way of using this?

Possibly in the sidebar or as a menu item? A simple IE plugin?

Thanks

[Reply]
By Mr. Polite on September 19th, 2008:
IE?

[Reply]
By - on October 7th, 2008:
Nothing about that IE piece of crap is simple. Are you thinking about the bloated insecure shit that is ActiveX?

[Reply]
By Chaz6 on Sep 18, 2008

Nifty!

[Reply]
By Greg Morgan on Sep 19, 2008

You know.. it would be cool if in the links to go from page to page, you made the target=”_self” I think that would make it easier to open in a sidebar.

[Reply]
By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on September 19th, 2008:
Done. Thanks for the tip!

[Reply]
By Doron on Sep 19, 2008

Boris, this is gonna be you cash cow! ;)

[Reply]
By Type3Singularity on Sep 19, 2008

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[Reply]
By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on September 19th, 2008:
That is beautiful! Thanks…

[Reply]
By Steven Carroll on Sep 19, 2008

Boris you are a true maverick, knocking out these little features almost monthly. I’m totally jealous….

[Reply]
By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on September 19th, 2008:
Blushing…

[Reply]
By Smokey McWankpants on Sep 19, 2008

“version 2″, “twitterkeys”, “morons”.

[Reply]
By edgar neo on Sep 19, 2008

would love it though of it worx on nu mobile browser / iPhone

[Reply]
By Uri L. on Sep 19, 2008

totally neat and extremely useful. Checkmate move, congrats. ♛ ♚

[Reply]
By shizzor on Sep 19, 2008

it’s like totally… useless.

“install” hahaha. omg.

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By anonymous on Sep 19, 2008

fantastic, you’ve re-invented windows character map.

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By Mark Nutter on Sep 19, 2008

What a brilliant capitalization on a very cool trick. Hats off. I’m trying to do the same thing myself with http://twitterless.com, a site I whipped up that tracks your follower history on twitter and notifies you when people stop following you. However, if Laporte mentions it the service will most definitely tank :)

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By adam on Sep 19, 2008

Boris, you made me laugh, again! When I noticed your Digg submission I called and emailed to my friends to help me to push it up. It is a real pleasure to promote something so kind, funny and useful:) I also wrote I ♥ U2, but guys didn’t like it there:)

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By Dievochka on Sep 19, 2008

My post about twitterkeys is on the homepage of our Digglike ” Scoopeo” and twitterkeys can be inserted in the comments on Scoopeo !

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By brian on Sep 19, 2008

people are just finding out about these alt-# symbols? They’ve been around prior windows 95.

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By Bob Boynton on Sep 19, 2008

You guys are famous!! You are showing up everywhere — I assume you saw the TechCrunch piece. Congratulations!!

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By pickupjojo on Sep 19, 2008

It’s a very nice tool, ASCII rocks!
Thanks for your work. ✌

(glad to see you so famous!)

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By Annon on September 20th, 2008:
Don’t you mean Unicode or True Type Fonts (and alike). ASCII is just the 128 character set - a standard designed so any computer can read and write data from another - seeing those glyphs on a computer who doesn’t have much unicode support will likely force the computer to render the text as single-byte-per-charater resulting in nonsense or it’ll just completly ignore it. I expect phones, as a basic computer, to be very limited in their extended charater support.

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By pickupjojo on September 20th, 2008:
Oh sh… You’re so right. :x

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By Jesse Gardner on Sep 19, 2008

I love what you guys have done… opened my eyes to Unicode. ☺ I put together something similar only I tried to get a lot more symbols and organize them by type. I also have it set up to copy to your clipboard when you click a symbol.

I’d love you hear your feedback on my little SymbolAssist.

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By ugh on Sep 19, 2008

old old OLD news, yawn.

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By mattarata on Sep 20, 2008

You need to CDN your twitterkeys page…. loads TOO SLOW.

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By design on Sep 21, 2008

✌ ☮

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By adrian Chan on Sep 23, 2008

very cool! how about twitter gifts? birthday cakes and beermugs?

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By Kevin on Sep 28, 2008

One can find more twitter applications at: http://i-stuff.blogspot.com/search/label/Twitter

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By suresh on Oct 15, 2008

This is amazing and beautiful, Thanks

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By Dora Crow on Oct 31, 2008

Hello,

This is very cool. ☻

Could you put the Halloween icons on the TwitterKeys?
I would use them even when it’s not Halloween!

Any plans for Christmas, Hanakkah, New Year’s…?

Thanks,
Dora Crow aka LaughingCrow ☪

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By Aaron on Dec 4, 2008

lol nice!!

http://www.carshowsdate.com

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