![]() Right now, Twitter is developing new features, for new times, and these things have to be tested before being rolled out across the site. Twitter also needs to test for the future. Of course, the implications of all this stretch beyond mere windows into Twitter’s past. You can see some of the profiles above, along with Following list of six profiles – including isn’t a test profile, obviously, although you will see evidence of testing relating to that account… So it was the simplest and most immediate task in the world to round up, from follow lists, a number of other Twitter test accounts – some even more obscure than the initial discovery, and showing followers totals of between 0 and 2. No invasions from the herd of Twitter geeks, etc. All you have to check, is the follow was an undiscovered account, so the follow lists were in very pure and uncorrupted shape. One test account is highly likely to connect to others. On Twitter, things naturally connect together. You may, in fact, have moved on from the discovery of this test account, to the scope for finding others. If you’re reading this post as a WordPress follower, as it goes out, you join me as one of the first outside of Twitter and its associates to know about this testbed, and gain a window into the actual testing sequence for direct photo uploads in tweets.īut if you’ve read my detailed studies on finding/exposing Twitter catfish, and recovering sequences of old you may already be a step ahead of this article. Even today, over five years after the historic launch of direct image uploads in tweets, has only 14 followers, and has not yet been beset with Likes or RTs. ![]() What surprised me was that virtually no one else had made the same discovery. Indeed, it was during a search for the earliest use of that image-dedicated subdomain that I discovered this particular test account. You’ll notice that the subdomain Twitter uses to host its native photos () was receiving content at least as early as 9th May 2011. The use of a Twitter feature, before the feature existed.Īctually, if you explore the contents of further, you’ll see a lot of interesting remnants from the period before photos officially “took flight” on Twitter. Once you see that date – 1st June 2011 – on a photo-tweet, you know you must be looking at a Twitter test account. And this makes for a fascinating discovery, because the only people who could have tweeted natively uploaded images before it was officially possible, would have been Twitter employees, or close associates. But in the deep underground of an unknown profile called there’s evidence of direct photo uploads having taken place before that day of launch. Officially, prior to 2nd June 2011, tweets had no means of accepting direct image uploads. Let’s begin with the account that tested Twitter’s direct photo uploads before the feature ever went public. We’ll be looking at a few important components in the history of Twitter’s development, which only a very small number of people outside Twitter have previously seen. In this post, I’m going to reveal some of these characteristic Twitter test accounts to you. But most of them are very, very obscure, and are therefore secret on the basis that hardly anyone knows about them. If Twitter had wanted to keep them strictly hidden, they wouldn’t be live on the open web with public status. Of course, these accounts (or at least the ones we can feasibly see) are not secret as in classified. ![]() We all get excited about finding things we weren’t meant to see, but for an Internet historian there’s a special kind of excitement in discovering official Twitter test accounts.
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