Paul Graham is now tweeting

Any idea when the process to claim inactive accounts is going to be fixed? My startup owns the domain associated with its name (which is pretty unique), but someone is squatting the relevant Twitter account without any activity. I already contacted Twitter but they said basically they can't do a thing unless I trademark the name, which is cost-prohibitive.

enki• 16 years ago

i saw a demo-day interview where pg said he doesn't use twitter because he couldn't find a suitable username (based on his real name).

i thought "if i was twitter, i'd find him one". guess that really happened :)

welcome!

rsingel2• 16 years ago

I would have loved if you landed him @pgtips.

cheesey2• 16 years ago

Hmm. Twitter needs tab completion.

novum3• 16 years ago

That wouldn't have helped here -- @avi is a valid username, too.

Edit: It should definitely autocomplete based on who you're following, but pg wasn't yet following anyone when he sent his first tweet.

pg4• 16 years ago

Damn. What an alarming medium.

jacquesm8• 16 years ago

So much for the stealth approach I guess ;)

The interesting part is not who follows you, but who you follow.

mhartl• 16 years ago

You can't edit tweets, but you can delete them. Mouse over the tweet in question and you'll see a trashcan icon and a 'delete' link.

Tichy• 16 years ago

Good timing, just days after announcing a deal with Facebook :-)

mrduncan• 16 years ago

The day after, in fact.

scruffy323• 16 years ago

Wow I don't think I have seen follows grow by double digits live before. Might be a first. At 4pm was just over 300

thibaut_barrere• 16 years ago

You could have seen even more digits: http://twitter.com/billgates

truebosko• 16 years ago

Pretty sure http://twitter.com/oprah was well in the 6 digits in her first day.

gcampbell• 16 years ago

http://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/19781239949

Locke1689• 16 years ago

Some of the 600 best friends you'll ever have! ;)

nkassis• 16 years ago

I hope he didn't put a real email address on his twitter account cause that just got flooded ;p

nprincigalli• 16 years ago

Not really, being mailbombed with 1k emails was a dramatic and painful experience in the early 90s, tho. Some ISPs had only POP3 access back then, and many MUAs didn't had a "delete without retrieving" feature.

mkr-hn• 16 years ago

I wonder how many are people, and how many are followbots.

d0m• 16 years ago

I remember following PG long time ago.. and then finding out he was a fake.

joshbert• 16 years ago

As long as it wasn't a fake account a la @fakecarolbartz or @fakeparamount I'd guess PG wouldn't have that much of a problem with it.

zcopley• 16 years ago

He should use identi.ca :)

noahlt• 16 years ago

Surprising that it took this long. PG's quotes page includes several by "Tara Ploughman", an anagram for "Not Paul Graham". When this was discovered, PG lamented the lack of a socially acceptable way to publish "single sentence essays". Twitter fills the gap nicely.

samstokes• 16 years ago

Nicholas Nassim Taleb (author of The Black Swan) uses Twitter for exactly that purpose: http://twitter.com/nntaleb "(I use twitter to test philosophical aphorisms/epigrams)."

tome• 16 years ago

"This person has protected their tweets."

Strange.

DanielBMarkham• 16 years ago

Be still my throbbing heart

(down-vote me all you want, this title was hero-worship lame)

hnote2• 16 years ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uMJYQ9LKGQ

it's just so funny how they use the same verb for it. God bless Pythons for Life of Brian!

  "I'M NOT THE MESSIAH!!!"
  "Well I say you are and I should know, I've followed a few."

randomwalker• 16 years ago

For those who might be confused by this comment, the original title ended with "... be one of his first followers."

dscape• 16 years ago

Who?

dkasper• 16 years ago

Wonder how many of those followers are real and how many are spam...

vaksel• 16 years ago

you are welcome HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1632531

jacquesm8• 16 years ago

That's either pretty prescient or they followed your suggestion to the letter.

andreyf• 16 years ago

Or pretty obvious ;)

pontious• 16 years ago

I think it is cool his web tweets are "via web"... very close to viaweb...

PStamatiou• 16 years ago

Get pg's tweets pushed to your phone with Push.ly and Notifo :)

Mazy• 16 years ago

Or just use Twitter's SMS feature.

akulbe• 16 years ago

I don't want to rain on anyone's parade... but how do we know this is the real Paul Graham?

Call me a wee bit skeptical.

pg4• 16 years ago

It's interesting how different it feels from commenting on HN. The box is so tiny, and you can't edit stuff afterwards. But you also don't have to deal with replies or worry about getting downvoted if you say something unPC.

I'm still not sure what to use it for, to be honest.

jacquesm8• 16 years ago

The box on HN already feels tiny!

> But you also don't have to deal with replies or worry about getting downvoted if you say something unPC.

Or getting banned ;)

elblanco• 16 years ago

I just resize it in chrome so it's bigger.

igravious3• 16 years ago

Use Chrome. Textboxes are resizable. Ridiculously useful feature that you never knew you needed until you're given it.

pkaler• 16 years ago

What did you have for lunch? Inquiring minds want to know! http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/4/23/

csallen• 16 years ago

You could keep us updated on...

1) the status of any essays (or RFSes) you're working on

2) startup-related insights and musings you have throughout the day (like the one about editable tweets)

3) links to HN stories or comments you find particularly interesting

4) your sleeping, social, and dietary habits

clemesha• 16 years ago

Yes 1, 2, 3! Avoid 4 :-)

dgallagher• 16 years ago

Tentatively awaiting the sequel to "Startups in 13 Sentences"...

"Startups in 140 Characters"

pg4• 16 years ago

Good idea: http://twitter.com/paulg/status/22316438109

olalonde• 16 years ago

I'd be interested to hear about YC companies: their status, progress, problems, etc.

brlewis• 16 years ago

Connect it to your FriendFeed account. You can edit FriendFeed posts afterward, and aren't as length-limited. Just check a box to cc twitter when posting to FriendFeed.

michael_nielsen4• 16 years ago

A rule that is obvious, but which most people on Twitter don't follow, is that it's best to share information that is simultaneously (a) interesting and (b) not already widely shared by others. Most people aim either for (a) or for (b), but not for both. csallen's suggestions elsewhere in this thread are useful, as with one exception they fulfill both (a) and (b).

This rule can be tipped upside down: it's best to follow people whose tweets mostly fulfill both these criteria. This rules out a very large number of people. It's amazing how many people fill their tweetstream with the news of the day from TechCrunch (or HN). It may be interesting, but it's already widely shared.

Personally, I find twitter most useful as a highly tailored source of links. That makes it sound similar to news sites such as HN, but the experience is different because you choose which people to follow. For instance, I get a lot out of following @NicholasGruen, who ran the Australian Government's Gov2.0 taskforce, @rjlipton, a leading theoretical computer scientist whose blog was the main clearinghouse in the scrutiny of the recent claimed proof the P is not equal to NP, @gnat of O'Reilly Media for an eclectic collection of tech-related links that for the most part fall outside the purview of the standard sources (TechCrunch etc), etc. Of course, those particular sources are just ones I find interesting, and they may not interest you. The point is that if you choose people whose tweet streams match your informational needs, Twitter can be very valuable.

igravious3• 16 years ago

Allow me to express a contrarian viewpoint. I get the feeling that this information gathering strategy leads to an amplified echo-chamber effect. You mostly only find out about stuff you already have an interest in and rarely stray from your comfort zone. Even coming to HN already limits your horizon to certain types of narratives and _also_ guarantees a limited response to those narratives because certain ways of responding to events are down-modded.

Added to the above effect is the pervasive misplaced hero worship and tech fanboyism that is formed based purely on peer pressure and not on merit.

IMHO , IANAL , posted in good faith , blah blah blah :)

jedbrown• 16 years ago

I prefer Google Reader for this stuff, the ability to have a threaded technical discussion is useful and not available with Twitter. Of course you can follow Twitter feeds with Reader, but these days I just follow Reader feeds of a few people that tend to satisfy (a) and (b). Note that @rjlipton hasn't made any Twitter updates in months, all the activity was on his blog, which would be in your news feed if you're at all interested in the problem.

avibryant2• 16 years ago

The great thing about the box being so tiny is that expectations are correspondingly low. To write an essay or even a blog post, you need to think through an issue in a fair amount of depth. Among other things, Twitter is for those half-formed thoughts or opinions that, given infinite time, you might one day write an essay about, but in real life they get dropped on the floor and never shared.

It's also a surprisingly effective place to solicit feedback, advice, or information (or get those unsolicited). For example, I don't know if you check your replies, but several Twitter engineers responded to your offhand comment about tweets being immutable.

chmike• 16 years ago

Just trying out tweeter. My first impression is that Signal to noise ratio seems so low... It feels like a waste of time or a productivity drain.

jl• 16 years ago

You could do some tweets about your amazing, beautiful and talented wife.

kyro• 16 years ago

He'll tell you he can't do that in only under 140 characters!

jrockway• 16 years ago

How much time do you spend being worried about getting downvoted on HN? :)

pg4• 16 years ago

I don't worry in the sense of caring about karma points, but I do have to think constantly about it. A lot of HN users get excited at the idea of contradicting me. So when I make comments I have to be careful not to leave any room for (innocent or willful) misinterpretation, or it will often breed some long and meretricious counterargument to something I didn't say. Which then gets upvoted while my original comment is downvoted, which gives people the impression that I actually did say whatever strawman is being attributed to me.

It's a weird problem. Person B's reply can change the apparent meaning of what person A writes. And the weirder thing is, this happens dynamically. If I take the trouble to reply quickly to the bogus counterargument, the pattern of the voting is usually the opposite, and the apparent meaning of what I said reverts to what I meant. But that is a huge time suck.

I've often wondered if there is some way to fix the design of comment threads to mitigate this, but I haven't found any answers yet, except not displaying points.

lionhearted• 16 years ago

> I'm still not sure what to use it for, to be honest.

I was in the same boat for a while, I'm just starting to get into the swing of it. You need to have some people you're mutually following that you respect and then it's a way to quickly send links and short ideas back and forth. It's a chicken and the egg problem for most people, but you should be able to get a pretty good crew mutually following you easily.

RyanMcGreal• 16 years ago

I've found my writing, particularly on email, has gotten a lot more terse since I started tweeting. Probably a good thing.

DanielRibeiro• 16 years ago

I am glad Avi helped you figure out a good name.

About editing: I think you can get away with deleting the tweet and reposting it. Not sure you can remove it entirely, as people can retweet you or favorite your tweet if you are not fast enough.

shadowsun7• 16 years ago

It's also interesting how one of your first tweets was that you made a mistake and you wanted to edit your tweet. I get that all the time, and I wish Twitter included an 'edit within the first 60 secs' feature.

_delirium• 16 years ago

You can delete tweets, and it seems not that uncommon to quickly delete an erroneous tweet and replace it with a fixed version. This is mildly frowned on, because some people's clients will poll before you manage to delete/replace, and then they'll get notified twice if they have some sort of "buzz my phone on tweet" kind of setup. (I think that setup is getting less common, though.)

subbu• 16 years ago

Startups in 137 chars: Make something someone specific needs, launch fast, let users show you what to change, change it, repeat last two.

More like these please.

SkyMarshal2• 16 years ago

There seem to be at least four distinct uses of Twitter I can make out, though I'm relatively new to it as well.

1. Random unimportant things you're doing or thinking during the day. Only your parents care, don't do this. If you must, get a separate Twitter account for it. Don't sabotage your primary public account's signal:noise ratio.

2. Carrying on twit conversations with people you follow/your followers. For the sake of your tens of thousands of other followers, please eschew the small talk and try to make it interesting to eavesdrop on.

3. Retweets of relatively high-value content from people you follow. Could be a link to a great essay/article/paper/breaking news, or an announcement, that you're helping circulate. This is all good.

4. High value original content of your own. Links to new essays or YC announcements, or condensed wisdom, etc. Also all good.

Anyone see any categories I missed?

lucisferre• 16 years ago

I use it to communicate with other software devs pretty regularly. It gives me quick instant access to experts in different areas. It has been most useful for me in that way.

bootload• 16 years ago

"... you also don't have to deal with replies or worry about getting downvoted ..."

downvoted you will get - saying something unPC on twitter is like singing the Blues in a Country & Western bar without the mesh to protect you. Twitter really is the trolls natural habitat.

huherto• 16 years ago

"if you say something unPC" or if you say something unPG ;-)

bhc3• 16 years ago

You write amazing blog posts, with great points of view (e.g. recent Yahoo post). One thing I've heard, and it strikes me as true, is that the best people on twitter are great writers. Why? When you write a post, you have a perspective, a point of view. That's the frame for your article. You then fill it with analysis, facts and perspective.

Twitter forces you to focus on the frame itself. And likely, just a part of it. Great for putting forth a central idea that can be pursued in greater detail elsewhere.

Your tweet on startups... "Startups in 137 chars: Make something someone specific needs, launch fast, let users show you what to change, change it, repeat last two."

...is a great example. There are multiple articles that could be written in relation to that observation. They help clarify and deepen the argument. But you managed to distill the essential elements of the idea into 137 characters.

I'd say think of the things you're seeing, the discussion you're following out there. Share your perspective, drawn from your own interests and activities, and the (possibly wrongheaded) points being made by others.

kfarzaneh• 16 years ago

30 new followers in one minute? PG gets the HN effect!

grovulent• 16 years ago

Write Haikus with it:

Start a company / listen to your user base / create destruction

gdltec• 16 years ago

Twitter is great to share links and short messages/news. It is not intended to be used as a conversation tool or long comments. Use it you feel the need for it, or don't.

Empact• 16 years ago

I'd like to think I had some small hand in this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1640314

i.e. I offered the "thepaulgraham" account, since deleted.

tyng• 16 years ago

This is awesome news! I hope Paul will have the time to tweet often

maximilian• 16 years ago

I now know about convertible notes, so there you go.

Evgeny• 16 years ago

Even that will not make me create a twitter account ...

Paul Graham is now tweeting

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