The Official Egg

Despite being replaced, the egg remains the most iconic and meme-able version of the default profile image in platform history. The Official Egg ($EGG) is a tribute to the original Twitter default profile image — the simple white egg on a colored background that every new account started with from 2010 to 2017. This wasn’t just a placeholder. It was the officially documented default avatar, served from Twitter’s own infrastructure at paths like: https://abs.twimg.com/sticky/default_profile_images/default_profile_1_normal.png through default_profile_6_normal.png Twitter’s developer documentation explicitly referred to users still using this image as “eggs.” The design was intentional: a playful reference to eggs hatching into the birds that would eventually send all the tweets. Different accounts received different background colors, making each egg slightly unique while remaining unmistakably the default. In 2017 Twitter retired the egg in favor of a generic gray silhouette, partly because the egg had become culturally associated with new, anonymous, and sometimes low-effort accounts. $EGG exists to permanently archive and celebrate the original, documented default.