Where does Jordan Spieth come out on Twitter?

Steven Loeb · April 13, 2015 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/3d2d

The young golf sensation has 339k followers, putting him among the elites in his sport

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Over the weekend, a young golfer made history, becoming the scond youngest Masters winner ever, at 21 years old, behind only Tiger Woods. He also was the first-ever golfer to reach 19 under, but ended up with a bogey on the 18th hole to end up 18 under, which tied the tournament scoring record held by Woods.

So, as it so happens, he became something of a Twitter sensation. Spieth now has 339,000 followers on his official account.

He got a note of congratulations from none other than Oscar winner Matthew McConaughey.

He has had women flinging themselves at him (even though he has a girlfriend)

And one of his own tweets was favorited over 69,000 times!

For a golfer whom I bet the majority of people had not heard of before this weekend, that's not bad. But how does he compare to other golfers?

Impressively, he now has only 10,000 fewer followers than Sergio Garcia, a much more accomplished golfer, and who has won over 20 international tournaments, including The Players Championship in 2008. He has 349,000 followers on his account. 

Phil Mickelson, who I would have said was the second most famous golfer in the country, has a pretty paltry following on Twitter, with only 74,000 followers

To be sure, Twitter is a relatively new phenomenon (9 years old). Mickelson is 44 years old, and won his first Masters in 2004, and then the PGA Championship in 2005 when Twitter wasn't around. Anyone who's made their name before Twitter wouldn't necessarily have a following, because back then, Twitter wasn't the way to collect fans. Today's stars will attract a much larger Twitter fan base faster, only because the public expects them to have it.

And what about that most famous golfer in the world - Tiger Woods? The one who, for a couple of decades, was the best at his sport? He blows them all away with 4.36 million followers on Twitter. I have to wonder, though, how many of those people are golf fans, and how many of them are only sitting around waiting for his personal life to blow up again. 

Despite being the top golfer on Twitter, Woods' number of followers still pales in comparison to numerous other athletes.

Soccer star Christiano Ronaldo, for example, has nearly 35 million followers. That's not surprising given how fantastic the rest of the world, outside of the United States, is about that sport. Tennis champion Rafael Nadal has 7.75 million

When I did the Twitter Superbowl earlier this year, I found that even some of the most famous NFL players only have around one million followers. Baseball players, who have long been some of the most recognizable sports stars, don't do that well either. Alex Rodriguez has just 117,000 followers; then again, he hasn't tweeted since July of 2014. I wonder why that might be...

Albert Pujols has 150,000 followers, Clayton Kershaw has 250,000, and David Ortiz has 817,000.

It is there is one sport that dominates above all others on Twitter, is is basketball. The NBA that seems to have cornered the market. LeBron James, meanwhile, has over 20 million and tennis champion Rafael Nadal has 7.75 million. Kobe Bryant has 6.48 million, Shaquille O'Neal has 9.67 million (that's gotta burn Kobe!) and Carmelo Anthony has 6.49 million

You know who Woods does beat? Disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong, who has 3.84 million followers and still identifies himself as  "7 X TdF champ."

Sure you were, buddy. Sure you were. 

(Image source: betcheslovethis.com)

tennis champion Rafael Nadal has 7.75 million

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What is Twitter?

Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests. 

Where did the idea for Twitter come from?

Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.

How is Twitter built?

Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes. 

We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.

How do you make money from Twitter?

There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.

In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet. 

At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.

Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.

 

What's next for Twitter?

We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users. 

We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.

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