Day 50 of 100

“I am starting Follow Fridays. Every Friday suggest a person to follow, and everyone follow him/her.”

In January 2009, I posted a tweet that became the largest hashtagged tweet ever. It was so big that it broke Twitter and invented the building of new features. Fourteen years later, there are still tweets that use the hashtag: #followfriday

It was a freezing Thursday night with a small gathering of friends in Boulder, CO. Two of them started to argue about which one could get to 1,000 followers first. It frankly was pretty hilarious as most of the argument was “No I will! No I will! No me! It’ll totally be me!” Finally, one looked at me and said “Micah, you have like 2,000 followers why don’t you ask people to follow me?!?!”

It wasn’t a good idea. Back then my early tweets were pretty awful. Nothing really cancellable, but just unfunny and without boundaries.

“It’s a bad idea. Every time I recommend someone they lose followers.” I explained. To prove it, I sent a tweet recommending one of them.

“Dammit! I lost a couple of followers!”

“Told ya.”

The night continued and the conversation shifted to some other topic (probably about my Rock Band rock band called the Hamswords, but that is a story for another day). Eventually, we all left and headed home.

The next morning I got to work, powered up my laptop, went to twitter.com, and typed in “I am starting Follow Fridays. Every Friday suggest a person to follow, and everyone follow him/her. Today it is @wiredone [now @dannynewman] and @fancyjeffery [now @Jeffrey].” A friend suggested a hashtag so I sent a follow up tweet suggesting folks use #followfriday, then fired off a few direct messages to friends to ask them to retweet the tweet, and I left to a meeting.

When I got back a few hours later, one out of every two tweets had the #followfriday hashtag attached. And it continued to grow through out the day. By Saturday it had almost completely died, and I forgot about it.

The next Thursday, #followfriday tweets started to show up on the timeline from overseas as it was Friday there. This Friday it was even bigger.

And it continued every Friday. Twitter pulled it out of the trending topics, and I learned later that it brought down the database. After a number of years, Twitter put out the Lists feature as a way for recommendation.

In the last fourteen years hundreds of millions of #followfriday tweets have been sent. It’s pretty amazing, and I am proud of being the creator.