Early Birds:

visualizing who owns @john, @mary, and other common first-name Twitter handles

By Carol Dinh ✦

In February 2022, Hole’s “Celebrity Skin” raged in my head, for whatever reason; I hummed it while studying, bopped along to its jubilant chorus on the way to class. Perhaps the music industry was testing a novel telekinetic advertising channel, because when Doja Cat dropped her cover of the feisty classic for her Super Bowl cameo, I dropped everything and turned it on. The moment was built for me. I remember how Doja revealed her collaboration with Hole’s frontwoman on Twitter: she simply tagged @Courtney.

That nine-character interaction had me thinking about the power, the mystique of the standalone first name: an icon in a package. There is only one Beyoncé, one Rihanna, one Elvis. There are many Courtneys, but none with the image of Courtney Love. The self-destructive bombshell. The notorious grunge widow. The poor user who’d replied to that post, “who's that”, was dragged cross-generationally, ratioed into oblivion. Who’s Courtney? Who’s Courtney? Who else could Courtney be?

Even for those of us who aren’t celebrities, there is an allure to claiming our own first name; declaring ourselves, in our own small bubbles, as the only Emily or the only Joshua in our world. One of my friends recently realized, with dismay, that they could have rejected the auto-suggested first-initial-last-name-number identifier when signing up for a college email, and instead been [first-name]@umd.edu. When another friend let slip that they had a second friend named Caroline, I jokingly demanded they admit I was the original. The other could be Caroline2.

But a lot of the first-namers weren’t just lucky early birds; they had a leg up. Twitter’s first employees, including founders Evan Williams and Noah Glass and future CEO Jack Dorsey, claimed @ev, @noah, and @jack in March 2006. (Twitter’s first public tweet was made by Dorsey, pictured below.)

just setting up my twttr

— jack (@jack) March 21, 2006

I took a list of the top 200 first names from the past century, half given to boys and half to girls, and combed the Twitter API for information on their owners on Twitter. 180 of them had active accounts (the other 20 had been disabled). Some of these accounts may have been the first to claim the name; others may have been bought, or re-claimed after the original account was deleted. Some of these accounts were engineers, designers, investors, and leaders in the tech industry; others were public figures establishing their presence on the emerging platform. And of course, we have our commoners. (My favorite is @keith with one follower, whose avatar depicts the Voltron character.)

Each account is represented below with a circle. The bigger the circle, the more followers they have. This, for example, is @jack.