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News – Growing Around the World

admin — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 21:31:56 +0000

Hi, my name is Matt Sanford and I’m the lead engineer for Twitter’s International team. I spend a great deal of time thinking about Twitter’s users outside of the US. Twitter’s first users were the early employees and their friends, largely based around our offices in San Francisco. Today we are a global information network, with a robust developer ecosystem and a website available in six languages. Our users on Twitter are even more geographically diverse we’re proud to report that over 60% of registered Twitter accounts come from outside the US. There are Twitter users in the large countries you’d expect, some smaller countries you might not expect (like the Vatican) and even one in outer space.

We’ve seen growth in every country and we’d like to share a few of their stories. The international team is small but we’re dedicated to making Twitter easier to use all over the world.
We made Twitter.com available in Spanish in November of 2009, and saw an immediate 50% boost in signups from Spanish-speaking countries. In the days following the tragic Chilean earthquake people turned to Twitter to establish much-needed lines of communication. Signups spiked 1200% and nearly all of those were using Spanish as their language. In Colombia, signups are up 300% after politicians like Piedad Crdoba Ruz began using Twitter as a platform to speak to constituents. Signups in India have increased nearly 100% since the beginning of 2010 due in part to politicians like Shashi Tharoor and Bollywood mega-stars Sharukh Khan, Priyanka Chopra and Abhishek Batchan. We partnered with Bharti Airtel, India’s largest carrier, to ensure that a large portion of India’s 550 million cell phone users can send and receive tweets via SMS at standard rates. We’ve also been partnering with carriers in countries like Indonesia and Haiti to bring Twitter to as many people in as many places as possible.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Twitter’s realtime information network gets more useful as our users grow more diverse and we’re continually impressed with the results. We continue to work hard to enable new languages and new partnerships around the globe and we look forward to seeing what happens as we make it easier for the whole world to communicate over Twitter.
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Technorati Tags: carriers, Haiti, network, news, partnering

News – Trust And Safety

admin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:46:27 +0000

As Director of Twitters Trust and Safety team, a big part of my job is focused on the detection and prevention of spam and abuse. A couple weeks ago, Biz explained how Twitter users were being victimized by phishing scams spread primarily through links in Direct Messages. Basically, people click the link and bad things happen. My team can only detect these scams after malicious links have already been sent out.

Today, were launching a new service to protect users that strikes a major blow against phishing and other deceitful attacks. By routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service, we can detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links across all of Twitter. Even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, well be able keep that user safe.

Since these attacks occur primarily on Direct Messages and email notifications about Direct Messages, this is where we have focused our initial efforts. For the most part, you will not notice this feature because it works behind the scenes but you may notice links shortened to twt.tl in Direct Messages and email notifications. Special thanks to @wfarner and @ram for building this service and helping keep us all a little safer!

News – Hello, Haiti

admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:16:52 +0000

If you have been following the events in Haiti since the devastating quake last month, then you know of the initial bursts of compassion. International dialogue now shifts from lifesaving relief to long term restoration. Officials are saying this may take ten years at a cost of billions.

Post-disaster needs assessment is underway and there will be an international donor conference late next month in New York City. In the meantime, there are ways to stay involved in sustained efforts such as the WFPs monthly donation program.

Kevin Thau and our mobile team have recently arranged free SMS tweets for Digicel Haiti customers. To activate the service, mobile phone users in Haiti can text follow @oxfam to 40404. Accounts are created on the fly and any account can be followed this way.

News – Enabling A Rush of Innovation

admin — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:42:48 +0000

Even before Twitter was officially a company, we opened our technology in ways that invited developers to extend the service. Before long, Twitter became a platform and an ecosystem of innovation began to grow. Recently we’ve announced partnerships with Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft. These Web leaders gained access beyond our free offerings we licensed them the full feed of all public tweets. This Fire hose of data is made possible by our Streaming API developed at Twitter by John Kalucki and team. There is a lot of useful information in this stream of data.

Full investment in this ecosystem of innovation, means all our partners should have access to the same volume of data, regardless of company size. More than fifty thousand interesting applications are currently using our freely available, rate-limited platform offerings. With access to the full Firehose of data, it is possible to move far beyond the Twitter experiences we know today. In fact, were pretty sure that some amazing innovation is possible.

Today, were happily turning the Firehose on for some new partners focused mainly on exploring the incredibly rich field of real-time search and discovery. We are thrilled to announce that Ellerdale, Collecta, Kosmix, Scoopler, twazzup, CrowdEye, and Chainn Search join us as partners. These companies range from funded startups to part-time, one-man operations so we came up with a fair way to license access
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Technorati Tags: John Kalucki, news, partners, partnerships, real-time, search, twitter news

News – The Power of Suggestions

admin — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 23:06:23 +0000

Hi, I’m Josh and I work in the product team at Twitter. One of the areas I’m working on is helping new users get started so they know how to find and discover what interests them. Today we’re making the first of many changes here to help people ease into the twitterverse by finding and following accounts that interest them.

Two of the biggest challenges for new users have been finding accounts to follow that appeal to their interests, and finding their friends and colleagues who tweet. Over time, we’ve learned that by making suggestions of who to follow, we can help users get going more easily on Twitter. In our new design, we’re taking some steps to continue to improve this process. Once a user signs up and selects what they’re interested in, we show them some accounts that relate to that interest. Next, we help them find their friends and colleagues by checking their address books, and third we give them a chance to search for anyone we or they missed in this process.

We’ve found that the power of suggestion can be a great thing to help people get started, but it’s important that we suggest things relevant to them. We’ve created a number of algorithms to identify users across a variety of clusters who tweet actively and are engaged with their audiences. These new algorithms help us group these active users into lists of users by interests. Rather than suggesting a random set of 20 users for a new user to follow, now we let users browse into the areas they are interested in and choose who they want to follow from these lists. These lis
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ts will be refreshed frequently as the algorithms identify new users who should be suggested in these lists and some that are not as engaging to new users will be removed. We also have a set of “Staff Picks” that are manually selected by Twitter employees as some of our favorites. Given the recent tragedy in Haiti, we’ve also created a special “Staff Picks for Haiti” to get updated news and content on what’s happening there.

We’re really excited about this change, and look forward to continually improving the experience for all users to discover the best content and get the most out of Twitter.