Courtesy of telegraph.co.uk
1. Twitter has its own DJ booth
Located in the centre of the office’s "breakout" space, it’s the place where celebrities come and "guest mix". The latest starlet was no other than Conan O’Brien, a US TV host and comedian, who then joined the host of other DJs and signed a cartoon version on himself on the Twitter wall of fame.
2. Tea time with Twitter
DJing usually goes on during the company’s weekly "tea time" session on Friday afternoons. It may sound very English and proper– but tea has long been replaced with beer to the soundtrack of someone jamming.
3. Twitter’s office was once home to Bebo
Michael Birch, the British-born entrepreneur who co-founded Bebo with his wife Xochi, was once based in Twitter's offices. Birch, who is now working on a host of new web start-ups in a building just down the road, proudly informed me that the Twitter DJ booth was indeed his creation. However, in his new office space, he’s opting for a more relaxing option this time round: a massage room.
4. Twitter has its own cushion range
Adorning the sofas around the office are sweet little cushions emblazoned with the stitched words: "Home Tweet Home". It gives the office of one of the hottest technology companies in the world rather a soft and country-bumpkin feel.
5. US model Tyra Banks plus two spray-painted deer give a good welcome
Twitter’s reception area is pretty sparse on ornaments, bar two brightly painted models of deer and a handful of web awards. However, nestled in the middle of their trophy shelf is a slightly incongruous photograph of Williams and Stone flanking none other than American-model-turned-TV-personality Tyra Banks. Perhaps Williams is hankering after a spot on her chat show after his time on the Oprah sofa last April.
6. Dick Costolo used to be a professional comedian
The man now tasked with monetising the microblogging phenomenon used to take improvisation comedy shows to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and have a TV slot on Paramount. This was long before he became a serial web entrepreneur, founder of Feedburner and an ex-Googler. Quite a CV ...
7. Birds rule the roost
Every meeting room at Twitter HQ is named after a different type of bird. I conducted my meetings in both @plover and @starling. The theme is taken one step further with the coat hooks in each room designed to resemble branches, with the company’s bird logo stencilled in black on to each office door. Twitter’s office designers were obviously trying to give twee its edge back. The result is rather cheery.
8. Employee number 140 earns the royal treatment
The company has more than doubled the number of staff in the last six months, with 175 people now working full time at Twitter HQ. However, employee 140, who is known simply as "140", earned himself a party when he joined. That status probably lost its uniqueness a little when Williams hired the 141st member of staff.
9. Evan: “Tweet more interesting stuff, Biz”
Stone admitted that, back in the early days of Twitter, when he would just tweet mundane details about his life (like: “Just getting up”), Williams would tell him to be more interesting in his 140-character messages.
10. AT& T mobile reception is poor … and yet they’re in the same building …
Twitter shares the same building as AT&T, the US telecommunication company and yet, while I was there, I could barely get one bar of AT&T mobile signal on my iPhone. The man on the general reception corroborated my story. Perhaps a word is in order.
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