Account #72,373. That number still gets me. Twitter launched publicly in July 2006, and I joined on December 15 – six months later, when the thing had maybe a few thousand active users and nobody was quite sure what it was for. You’d see posts asking whether this was even a real app or just a toy a few bored engineers had built on a weekend. The answer, it turned out, was both.
Earlier this year I did the same thing with my LinkedIn network – 23 years of professional connections, analysed properly. There’s something satisfying about pulling the actual data on a platform you’ve used for decades and seeing what it says back. So when my full X archive landed in a zip file, I wasn’t going to just scroll through it.
My first tweet was on December 16, 2006. It read: “watching telly.”
That’s it. No grand statement of intent. No “excited to join this new platform!” No hashtags. Just a man on his couch, watching something on TV, for some reason telling a small cluster of strangers about it on the internet. Twenty years later I have no memory of what I was watching, but the tweet is still there.
The Numbers
I had my archive analysed properly. Here’s what 20 years of posting actually looks like.
35,783 tweets total – broken into 30,590 original tweets, 1,736 replies, and 3,480 retweets. Across 6,799 unique days, out of roughly 7,300 days between December 2006 and now. So I posted on about 93% of all possible days.
The longest consecutive streak was 1,032 days. Nearly three years without missing one. I have no idea when that was, and honestly I’m slightly concerned about myself.
Average: 5.26 tweets per day. Peak year was 2016 with 7,384 tweets – about 20 a day. Peak hour, consistently, was 8am AEST. Before work, with coffee. The average tweet length across the whole archive is 88 characters, which is well under the original 140-character limit, and well under the current limit of 280. I was never really a maximiser.
The year-by-year arc tells a story. In year one – 2006 to 2007 – I posted 4,660 tweets. I was a Microsoft evangelist in Sydney, going to conferences, meeting developers, and the platform felt genuinely electric. Something new was happening and nobody had figured out the rules yet, which was the best possible state for it to be in.
Then, as it does, the novelty wore off. From 2008 through 2014 the numbers dropped and stabilised somewhere between 1,000 and 1,800 a year. Still posting, but not with the same intensity.
Then 2015 and 2016 happened: 6,400 tweets and then 7,384. I’d moved to Telstra in 2014, working in the CTOi innovation team, and was very publicly engaged in Australian tech conversations. Tech Twitter was also at something like peak influence – the feeds felt worth reading, the conversations felt worth having. So I leaned in hard.
2017 through 2019 stayed high (5,400, then 5,300, then 4,500). I transitioned from Telstra to AWS in 2018, and that seemed not to slow things down much.
2020 was the step change. Down to around 2,900, and declining from there. COVID, a more internally-focused role at AWS, and eventually a career break and the start of SmallBizAI. The public voice got quieter.
2025 and 2026 show a slight uptick. The public voice is back, more or less. Different reasons, same platform.
The Best Tweets, According to the Data
By likes, the clear winner is a tweet from April 2020 during COVID lockdown: a Pokémon GO Community Day post – specifically Abra Community Day – with a GO Snapshot photo. 1,291 likes and 84 retweets. I posted it during lockdown, in a moment of pure uncomplicated joy, and it spread quietly through the Pokémon GO community without me doing anything to help it along. No thread, no call to action, no hashtag strategy. Just a good Abra photo at the right moment.
Second is from May 2007. 322 likes. The tweet: “just had a brainstorm – too busy to twitter = 2b2t. spread the meme”. I was trying to coin a Twitter shorthand. It did not catch on. The internet is patient about these things, though – 322 people eventually found it and liked it, which is more than most failed coinages get. I count this as a moral victory.
Third: April 2019, 81 likes. “Never gets old 🌈” – a video of the Tullamarine Bridge rainbow light display, posted coming home from a trip interstate. Landing back in Melbourne, crossing the Tulla, lights on. It got 81 likes, which is more than most things I’ve ever said about cloud computing. There is a lesson here about what people actually want from the internet and I’m choosing to accept it.
Fourth: February 2020, 64 likes. “Happy 29th Anniversary 🥰😍💍💒 2️⃣9️⃣” – Moira and I were married in February 1991. This one got more engagement than most things I’ve ever said about technology, which is either heartwarming or instructive, depending on your mood.
Fifth: December 2017, 62 likes. “Leaving Telstra.” Career transitions land. People care where people are going. That one was a bigger deal at the time than I probably let on.
Some Encounters Worth Mentioning
I worked at Microsoft from 1991 to 2014. In 2017, I tweeted about Satya Nadella: “Before he was CEO, he pitched Excel to developers in a 1993 telecast (I was at Microsoft at the time).” The man went from pitching spreadsheets to running the most valuable company in the world. I have 16 mentions of @satyanadella in my archive, which I’m sure means nothing to him but feels like a fun footnote from my end.
September 24, 2024. During an episode of Only Connect, Victoria Coren Mitchell joked on air that AI had written the show’s intro. So I asked ChatGPT to write her one. It produced something about “a cryptic crossword having a secret affair with a Rubik’s Cube, raised by an eccentric professor with a penchant for lateral thinking.” I posted the full exchange – prompt and reply – so she could see exactly what I’d asked for. She replied. That tweet got 33 likes, which is my fourth most-liked tweet of all time. For a certain kind of person, having the host of Only Connect see your ChatGPT prompt and respond anyway is a legitimate life highlight. I am that kind of person and I’m at peace with it.
July 31, 2019. Richard Osman tweeted that Inside The Factory was the best show on telly. 1.7K likes on his tweet. My daughter Emma (@emmaarri) tagged me into the thread: “@frankarr I think you’d agree with this.” I replied with “No doubt” and a GIF of a pug dressed as Lucy Ricardo at the chocolate factory conveyor belt. Rick Edwards jumped in to argue The Repair Shop was better. Osman replied to Rick: “I refer you to my 400 previous tweets on the subject.” My role in this entire exchange was GIF delivery vehicle, and I was recruited by my own daughter. I regret nothing.
December 2017, Moira and Emma cooked a vegan m’hanncha from a Jamie Oliver recipe. They tagged him. He replied. That tweet got 55 likes, which is more than almost anything work-related I’ve ever posted. Draw your own conclusions about what people actually want from social media.
And then there’s Robert Scoble – 54 interactions over the full archive. He was one of the first tech bloggers I followed, back in December 2006 when I joined. The archive shows a conversation that stretched across years. Tech Twitter had a genuine community in those early days. Scoble was a big part of that.
How I Posted
The source breakdown is basically a personal tech autobiography.
Twitter for iPhone tops the list at 14,936 tweets, just nudging ahead of Twitter Web at 14,205 – the early years were desktop-first, then mobile took over and never gave it back. Twitter for Android accounts for 7,315, which means I had an Android phase (or multiple Android phases – the archive doesn’t get that specific). GaggleAMP contributed 4,126 tweets during the Telstra and AWS years; it’s an enterprise social amplification tool, which tells you something about how seriously large companies took social media in that period. IFTTT at 2,735 is the automation era. LinkedIn cross-posts at 2,710 are the SmallBizAI period. iPad at 2,379. TweetDeck at 2,081 – the power user phase. Windows Phone at 1,625.
Windows Phone. Of course.
There’s probably a BlackBerry in there somewhere too, which I’m choosing not to investigate further.
What the Hashtags Say
My top hashtag across 20 years is #melble at 1,435 uses. Not football – it’s a daily Wordle-style puzzle where you’re shown the outline of a Melbourne suburb and have to name it in six guesses or fewer. I played it obsessively. The archive proves it.
#lastfm and #tapmusic together account for 1,106 – both music scrobbling automations from the IFTTT era. I was feeding my listening data into Last.fm and auto-tweeting it, which seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do in 2012. #melbourne (316), #eurovision (294 – an annual ritual, still ongoing), #fitstats_au (272, fitness tracking automation), #gosaints (264, there’s that St Kilda again), #getglue (264, TV check-ins from the pre-Netflix streaming era), #telstralabs (261, the Telstra innovation unit), and #awssummit (253, the AWS conference circuit).
The early hashtags are tech conferences and platform experiments. The later ones are sports, television, music. The personal won out over the professional, which is probably how it should go.
Talking to Myself
The most-replied-to account in my entire archive is @frankarr – myself – with 708 replies. I replied to my own tweets more than to any other person on the platform. This was threading before Twitter had threads, essentially. Whether that makes me a proto-thread pioneer or just someone who couldn’t stop adding “one more thing” to a tweet is a matter of perspective.
After me, the most frequent reply targets are a tight crew of Australian tech Twitter: @guy_franklin (184 replies), @OffBeatMammal (173), @NickHodgeAU (121), @keranm (119). Those conversations feel like a different era of the internet – smaller, more focused, people who actually knew each other at conferences and then continued the conversation online. I miss that version of it.
The Milestones
Tweet #1, December 16, 2006: “watching telly.”
Tweet #1,000, April 2007: a reply to @Emo_Geek.
Tweet #10,000, May 2011: “Taking the gang to the footy #gosaints.”
Tweet #20,000, March 2017: “Goodbye, sci-fi. Hello, reality.”
Tweet #30,000, July 2023: a Wordle result.
Tweet #50,000, March 17, 2025: “Happy #StPatricksDay.”
The progression from excited tech early adopter to Wordle player is, I think, the arc of Twitter itself. We all started by trying to figure out what the thing was for. Most of us ended up at word games.
Still Here
I joined in December 2006 when the company had about 20 employees. Since then: acquired by a billionaire, renamed, algorithmically rearranged, politically charged, and declared dead at least six times by people who then kept posting anyway. The timeline is different. The replies are sometimes unhinged. The character limit went up, which nobody asked for.
I’m still posting. Account #72,373. Series 10 of House of Games starts this week. Some things are consistent..
Leave a Reply