A little more than 24 hours ago we posted a bookmarklet here titled TwitterKeys and then all hell broke loose. Here is what happened before we launched it and what has happened since.
On Tuesday evening, just as I was getting ready to go home, I noticed a Tweet on Twitter with a symbol in it which I hadn’t seen before. I copy pasted the symbol and Tweeted it:
Sander (@sandervdv) was working next to me and said “Hey, just open your Character Palette. There are tons of symbols there that you can copy paste”. I immediately did and then replied “Very cool, but kind of hard to find. Can’t we just put them all in a floating browser window so you can easily copy paste them while you are Twittering?”. Sander smiled and said “Sure, and I can even write a Bookmarklet so you can easily access it”.
Then I left the office and went home. At 8pm I opened my laptop and found Sander’s Bookmarklet code in my Inbox. I did a quick test with the help of a few Twitter users to see which symbols would work on all platforms and by 10 pm I uploaded the files, wrote a simple post with the details and launched the whole thing by Twittering the following line:
I ♥ this ☛ http://tinyurl.com/5hpf4f ☺
Immediately I noticed people starting to play with the characters and flowers, comets and stars flying all over Twitter. Within a few hours the Twitter founders found out about TwitterKeys and twittered about it:
Biz Stone (Twitter.com Co-Founder & 16,680 followers):
“Trying out TwitterKeys ☺ which helps you put little icons in your tweets ♥”
http://twitter.com/biz/statuses/923898532
Evan Williams (Twitter.com Co-Founder & 18,650 followers):
“♺ @biz‘s post about http://bit.ly/twitterkeys. Neat! ”
http://twitter.com/ev/statuses/923901604
Then other famous people started talking about it:
Howard Rheingold (3,908 followers)
“I ♥ this ☛ http://tinyurl.com/5hpf4f ☺ via @bomega”
http://twitter.com/hrheingold/statuses/923879515
Leo Laporte (55,837 followers)
“I ♥ Twitterkeys. ☛ http://snipurl.com/3r09l ☚”
http://twitter.com/leolaporte/statuses/924264132
So within a few hours these 4 Big Twitter users promoted Twitterkeys to their combined 95,075 followers. The result? About 15,000 unique visitors to the original blog post within 24 hours, 60+ diggs, lots and lots of TwitterKeys on Twitter, reviews on 150+ blogs and a nice spike in RSS Feed subscribers…
Today we launched version 2 of TwitterKeys which displays even more characters. If you haven’t installed it yet do it now:
Here at The Next Web Blog we love to write about people working on Next Web technologies and services. But we also love to contribute a little ourselves from time to time. Hope you like what we do!
♥ it.
the ✔ choice ☺
Just updated it AGAIN… :-)
There is now a third page with these symbols:
© ® ™ … ∞ ¥ € £ ƒ $ ≤ ≥ ∑ « » ç ∫ µ ◊ ı ∆ Ω ≈ * §
• ¶ ¬ † & ¡ ¿ ø å ∂ œ Æ æ π ß ÷ ‰ √ ≠ % ˚ ˆ ˜ ˘ ¯ ∑ º ª
I ♥ Twitter
IE?
Nothing about that IE piece of crap is simple. Are you thinking about the bloated insecure shit that is ActiveX?
I have too many favorites/bookmarks to have that toolbar open.
Is there another way of using this?
Possibly in the sidebar or as a menu item? A simple IE plugin?
Thanks
Nifty!
Done. Thanks for the tip!
You know.. it would be cool if in the links to go from page to page, you made the target=”_self” I think that would make it easier to open in a sidebar.
Boris, this is gonna be you cash cow! ;)
That is beautiful! Thanks…
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Blushing…
Boris you are a true maverick, knocking out these little features almost monthly. I’m totally jealous….
“version 2″, “twitterkeys”, “morons”.
would love it though of it worx on nu mobile browser / iPhone
totally neat and extremely useful. Checkmate move, congrats. ♛ ♚
it’s like totally… useless.
“install” hahaha. omg.
fantastic, you’ve re-invented windows character map.
What a brilliant capitalization on a very cool trick. Hats off. I’m trying to do the same thing myself with http://twitterless.com, a site I whipped up that tracks your follower history on twitter and notifies you when people stop following you. However, if Laporte mentions it the service will most definitely tank :)
Boris, you made me laugh, again! When I noticed your Digg submission I called and emailed to my friends to help me to push it up. It is a real pleasure to promote something so kind, funny and useful:) I also wrote I ♥ U2, but guys didn’t like it there:)
My post about twitterkeys is on the homepage of our Digglike ” Scoopeo” and twitterkeys can be inserted in the comments on Scoopeo !
people are just finding out about these alt-# symbols? They’ve been around prior windows 95.
You guys are famous!! You are showing up everywhere — I assume you saw the TechCrunch piece. Congratulations!!
Don’t you mean Unicode or True Type Fonts (and alike). ASCII is just the 128 character set – a standard designed so any computer can read and write data from another – seeing those glyphs on a computer who doesn’t have much unicode support will likely force the computer to render the text as single-byte-per-charater resulting in nonsense or it’ll just completly ignore it. I expect phones, as a basic computer, to be very limited in their extended charater support.
It’s a very nice tool, ASCII rocks!
Thanks for your work. ✌
(glad to see you so famous!)
I love what you guys have done… opened my eyes to Unicode. ☺ I put together something similar only I tried to get a lot more symbols and organize them by type. I also have it set up to copy to your clipboard when you click a symbol.
I’d love you hear your feedback on my little SymbolAssist.
old old OLD news, yawn.
Oh sh… You’re so right. :x
You need to CDN your twitterkeys page…. loads TOO SLOW.
✌ ☮
very cool! how about twitter gifts? birthday cakes and beermugs?
One can find more twitter applications at: http://i-stuff.blogspot.com/search/label/Twitter
This is amazing and beautiful, Thanks
Hello,
This is very cool. ☻
Could you put the Halloween icons on the TwitterKeys?
I would use them even when it’s not Halloween!
Any plans for Christmas, Hanakkah, New Year’s…?
Thanks,
Dora Crow aka LaughingCrow ☪
lol nice!!
http://www.carshowsdate.com
wow awesome stuff
http://www.sevenfigincomes.com/
Twitter has a lot of growing rom and we all need to be a part of the windfall
http://www.squidoo.com/twitter-power-marketing
That is absolutely insane! Who would have thought simple little characters like that could bring you so much fame. Is fame the right word? Yes, yes it is. :P
~Rebecca
I’m still very much a newby, in Twitterland…so please bare with me. For some reason, I cannot seem to drag the link, as it states to do, to my Bookmark. It won’t go! What’s up with that…?
Thank you so much for any help I can get regarding this.
Great article, too! There is so much to learn!
~Donna
okay, so when I look at the Twitterkeys, I see a few symbols, but for the most part, I see incomprehensible boxes with numbers in them. What, computer-wise, am I lacking? Thanks.