The story behind Twittersnowball

Virals often appear on Twitter, little web apps that suddenly become extremely famous. While me and some colleagues were having a break at Toscani we talked about such apps and some ideas appeared. One of those ideas was throwing snowballs over Twitter. I thought it was a funny idea and I promised I’d create it when I got back home. That night I launched the website. For about a month it was online without any special activity (in the fall).

29 November (2010) it all started, the first snowflakes were falling in The Netherlands. I remember stepping on the train at the end of my schoolday when I received a text from a colleague. He notified me that the hashtag #snowballfight suddenly became Trending Topic in The Netherlands! I looked for a seat in the train and grabbed my phone (android) to check Twitter. People were throwing about 3000 snowballs every hour. At 22:00, already 27.000 snowballs had been thrown.

The next day I visited TEDxAmsterdam (30 November) and at the end of the day, the counter hit the 70.000 snowballs at a rate of 280 snowballs every minute!