RIP Selective Tweets: 27th Jan 2009–1st Aug 2018

On 1st August 2018 a change to the Facebook API removed the ability for Facebook apps to publish directly to people’s Facebook profiles. As as result the app can no longer perform it’s function of cross-posting status updates from Twitter to Facebook.

9.5 years after the app first launched, this therefore marks the end of the road for Selective Tweets (as well as any other app that previously supported cross-posting tweets or any other content to personal Facebook profiles, including apps such as IFTTT and Twitter itself).

Some fun nostalgic stats and stories..

• The app was live for 9 years, 6 months, and 6 days — from 27th January 2009 to 1st August 2018.
• 1.25M Facebook users and pages tried it out.
• At its’ peak around 2012–2013, over 150k monthly active people were using Selective Tweets to cross-post over 3M monthly status updates (that’s more than 1 update every second). Over time, usage habits for social media changed — by it’s end, usage had fallen to just over 3,000 active people per month.
• The app (MySQL database, Apache web server and background processes monitoring the Twitter streaming API, enqueuing tweets and posting to the Facebook API) ran entirely on one AWS t1.micro instance, initially under the AWS free tier, at an all-time cost of $1,663.92 (~£1,300).
• Over 9 years, 383 people used the donation link on the setup page to donate a total of £2,060.94 (an average of £5.38 per donating user, ~1.4p per active user, or 0.16p per user signed up).
• After I open-sourced the code on Github it was forked 24 times, starred 88 times and amassed 16 watchers.
• After Selective Tweets gained traction, LinkedIn added similar functionality to cross-post tweets when tagged with #li or #in, and Yammer added similar support for #yam.
• In 2010, Zynga automatically added the #fb hashtag to tweets posted from within games — seemingly in the hope these would get picked up by users of Selective Tweets and further distributed to users’ Facebook timelines..
• On 17th September 2010, a bug with the Twitter streaming API passed along a tweet with an invalid empty userid. This in turn triggered a bug in Selective Tweets at the time, which assumed Twitter would always provide valid data. The resultant SELECT .. FROM users WHERE twitter_id = '' query unfortunately matched several thousand users who had cleared their twitter handle within settings in an attempt to uninstall the app, but failed to fully uninstall it. I landed in Berlin on a trip to visit friends, to discover a post on the allfacebook.com blog reporting “Selective Tweets app goes crazy; updates thousands of people’s statuses”. The tweet? “Sitting at the doctor’s office..not a fun day”. To this day I’m none the wiser as to the true identity of the unfortunate individual whose plight was distributed far wider than they or I ever expected..

A big thank you to anyone who ever used it, and shared it with others (and a special thanks to those who donated!) I hope you found it useful.

RIP Selective Tweets.