Further down the chain however, some Apple employees do have active Twitter accounts, but with rare exceptions they don’t talk about their work. Around the time of the Gizmodo/iPhone 4 leak story, Business Insider collected a number of Apple employee tweets on different topics, although one employee listed has protected his Twitter account after a particularly strongly worded tweet.
The first Apple employee on Twitter that I discovered was Michael Jurewitz, Mac and iPhone application frameworks and developer tools evangelist. Lately, he’s been quick to tweet when a new developer release hits and has been highly responsive to his followers with @replies to Xcode 4 questions. He is most definitely Apple’s top Twitter user.
[blackbirdpie url="http://twitter.com/jurewitz/status/19291959157"]
Update: I’ve removed the list of Apple employees with Twitter accounts that was in the initial post.
The original intent was to both take a look at the absence of Apple’s senior execs from Twitter as well as see if other Apple employees that do tweet or blog make a conscious effect to avoid commenting on Apple matters. It’s generally assumed that Apple has a strict social network policy, and I didn’t intend to debate that one way or the other. Rather, I wanted to lay the facts out there, and gather some opinions in the comments, after having seen the vibrant discussions among indie Mac and iOS developers on Twitter and the community that that fosters.
Within hours of posting it, I was in touch with two people on the list already who expressed concerns, and immediately removed their names from it. Another name turned out to be a former employee by now. Sensing a trend, I reconsidered what I was trying to accomplish by the post, and came to the conclusion that there was nothing to be gained from a list of Apple employees who happen to be on Twitter, when they aren’t really talking about anything Apple related. Not only was the undue attention I was giving them potentially problematic for them, but it strayed too far from the original intent of this blog, which is to document my findings while learning iPhone development.
And yet I did not want to remove this post entirely, since knowledge of it was already out there. I wanted to be open about what was going on. I’ve learned that both Twitter and blogging is tricky business. What seems like a great piece at 3 AM doesn’t always turn out to be so the next morning. Some people have an innate desire to communicate with their peers, share opinions about the things that they are passionate about and offer a helping hand. And sometimes conflicts arise, either with corporate policies of how a company wants to manage its marketing and public image in a deliberate way, or with the best interests of the creative and technical talent that works hard at these companies to produce amazing products.
So in the spirit of all that, I decided to modify this post and remove the final 10 names from it, with the exception of Michael Jurewitz, since he is clearly applying his evangelist role to Twitter in an official or at least acknowledged capacity.
If you’re curious, @sjobs is home to an impostor posting in Spanish with over 400 followers and @stevejobs is unused, has 8,567 followers to date and was created back in April of 2009. Based on the 6 people it follows, it’s unlikely to be someone at Apple reserving the Twitter handle for him. Other variants on his full name of Steven Paul Jobs all exist with a smattering of followers each, including @stevenpauljobs, which attempted to briefly fool people with genuine sounding updates in January 2008. A few fake Jonathan Ive Twitter accounts exist too.
The unaccredited, but self-admitted parody account @ceostevejobs boasts a staggering 133,000 followers, while Dan ‘Fake Steve Jobs’ Lyons‘ Twitter account for the his alter ego’s blog barely has 7,000.
So what do you think? Is Apple missing out buy not being more vocal on Twitter? Do they have anything to gain by using the medium more? Leave a note in the comments.