As a member of the Twitter analytics team, part of my job is to measure and understand growth. The graph above tells a story of how weve grown over the past three years in terms of number of tweets created per day. Please note that tweets from accounts identified as spam have been removed so the counts in this chart do not include spam.

Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per daythats an average of 600 tweets per second. (Yes, we have TPS reports.)

Tweet deliveries are a much higher number because once created, tweets must be delivered to multiple followers. Then theres search and so many other ways to measure and understand growth across this information network. Tweets per day is just one number to think about. Well make time to share more information so please stay tuned.

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Technorati Tags: Measuring Tweets, Twitter, twitter news

Technorati Tags: John Kalucki, news, partners, partnerships, real-time, search, twitter news

Anatomy of A Phishing Scam

Generally a phishing attack against Twitter users breaks down to a three-part process. First, accounts compromised in the manner described above send out messages to all accounts following them. Second, accounts that are newly compromised send out more messages. Third, the scammers behind the phishing attack make an attempt at monetization by sending out spam links instead of links to a fake login page. We fight phishing scams by detecting affected accounts and resetting passwords. However, its better to stop them before they start.

Avoiding Phishing Scams

We designed the Direct Message system so that you could only get DMs from accounts that you choose to follow this cuts way down on spam and attacks. Our Trust and Safety team identifies and deletes spam accounts every day. Still, we recommend against indiscriminately following hundreds or thousands of accounts without having a look first. To learn how you can avoid falling victim to a phishing scam or if you have other questions about keeping your Twitter account secure, please read Keeping Your Account Secure at our help site.

For regular status updates on related issues. please follow @safety and @spam. There is also a Twi
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Technorati Tags: accounts, passwords, Phishing, phishing attack, Scam, twitter news, usernames

We categorized each incoming tweet as about the Super Bowl itself, about the brands or the commercials, or neither. Dividing each group by the total volume of tweets, we produced the graph below which represents a minute-by-minute reflection of people’s thoughts and emotions during the game.

The horizontal axis is time. The vertical axis is a percentage: the blue line is the percentage of tweets, relative to the total worldwide tweet volume, that were about the Super Bowl each minute, while the red line is the percentage of tweets that were about brands or commercials. Click the image for a more detailed version.


You can see excitement spike with the kickoff at marker A. Everyone watching was geared up for the first commercial break at marker B, hoping for funny or memorable ads; as soon as the first commercial break began, viewers were immediately tweeting about it. The first @DoritosUSA ad at marker C caused the largest per-minute volume of commercial-related tweets — for the minute following the ad, related tweets were 19% of all tweets we saw, eclipsing even the chatter around the Super Bowl itself for a brief period. Back in the game, excited or dismayed tweets following the first @Colts touchdown at marker D formed nearly 40% of all tweets that minute. The second half began with a bang as @TheSaints recovered a surprise onside kick, and for the next minute 44% of all worldwide tweets were about football. Chatter around brands had meanwhile dropped to much lower levels until @Google’s Parisian Love commercial sparked viewers once more. Excitement around the game grew steadily with large peaks following scores and turnovers up until the final moments. As the game ended, one out of every two tweets on Twitter was about the Super Bowl!

Every day millions of people interact with Twitter to share and discover what’s happening now. Major events like the Super Bowl focus people around a few common topics. There is real value in being able to measure the reach and influence of those topics in real time, and we in the analytics team are looking forward to a lot more where this came from. On to the Winter Olympics…

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Technorati Tags: analytics, commercials, football, Super Bowl, twitter news

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
fef
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.

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Technorati Tags: finding, following, news, Twitter, twitter news

Google, Bing deals make Twitter profitable: BusinessWeek

WASHINGTON (AFP)
Twitter has reached profitability after signing deals with Google and Microsoft to make the micro-blogging service searchable on the Internet, BusinessWeek magazine reported on Monday.

BusinessWeek, which was purchased in October by financial news agency Bloomberg, said Twitter had signed a 15-million-dollar data-mining deal with Google and a 10-million-dollar agreement with Microsoft.

“The deals were huge,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek quoted an unidentified person “familiar with the company’s finances” as saying. “With two scoops of the pen, a lot of revenue came in.”

The magazine said the agreements to make Twitter messages known as “tweets” searchable by Google and Microsoft’s new search engine Bing “carry sufficient value to help Twitter achieve a small profit for 2009.”

It said Twitter also achieved profitability by renegotiating deals with telecommunications companies to bring down costs.

Twitter has been working on ways to make money from its globally popular service, and revenue producing ideas mentioned to date include selling premium accounts that businesses could use for marketing or image building.

The San Francisco-based startup has won millions of users since the service that allows people to pepper one another with 140-character-or-less messages launched in August 2006.

Technorati Tags: Bing, deals, Google, twitter news, Twitter profitable

USGS monitoring Twitter for earthquake details – Yahoo! News

LOS ANGELES – OMG! Earthquake!

The U.S. Geological Survey is scouring the popular microblogging site Twitter soon after a temblor hits to pinpoint regions where shaking occurred.

“People like to tweet after earthquakes,” USGS seismologist Paul Earle said Monday during an American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

There is usually a lag between when an earthquake strikes and when researchers can analyze the data that floods in from seismic stations. During that gap, scientists combing through hundreds of tweets can get an initial picture of where the shaking was felt and areas of potential damage.

A prototype system aggregates tweets based on key words such as “earthquake” or the equivalent in different languages. It can then send an e-mail listing the cities where the tweets came from and what the tweets said.

“It would give you a little information about what potentially happened in that earthquake,” Earle said.

There are still wrinkles to be worked out. Scientists are developing filters to distinguish tweets about a real temblor from say, an earthquake drill that can cause scores of people to pound out 140 characters.

___

On the Net:

USGS Twitter Earthquake Detector: http://twitter.com/USGSted

Technorati Tags: twitter news

Texas County to Name Drunk Drivers on Twitter – Yahoo! News

If you get busted for drunk driving in Montgomery County, Texas, this holiday season, your neighbors may hear about it on Twitter.

That's because the local district attorney's office has decided to publish the names of those charged with driving while intoxicated (DWI) between Christmas and New Year's Eve.

County Vehicular Crimes Prosecutor Warren Diepraam came up with the idea as a way of discouraging residents from getting behind the wheel while drunk. “It's not a magic bullet that's going to end DWIs, but its something to make people think twice before they get behind the wheel of a car and drive while they're intoxicated,” he said.

The Houston-area county will start publishing names on Twitter during holiday weekends such as the Christmas holidays, Fourth of July and Memorial Day, which are thought of as times when a lot of people drive while intoxicated.

The information is already a matter of public record and it is not uncommon for local newspapers in the U.S. to publish the names of those charged with drunk driving or soliciting a prostitute as a kind of public shaming. But these practices are controversial, and some legal pundits wonder if publishing names on Twitter is going too far.

A “person who's been arrested is still innocent unless proven guilty,” said Houston defense attorney Paul Kennedy in a blog posting. “My question is should the DA dismiss a case against a motorist or should a motorist be acquitted by a jury of his peers, will Mr. Diepraam offer a public apology on Twitter as well?”

Just “because facts are publicly known and made available by the media, doesn't mean the prosecutor has to actively publicize these facts,” wrote Venkat Balasubramani, a lawyer and Internet law blogger.

Diepraam dismissed such criticism. “We're not putting information in the public that's unavailable,” he said. “In our area, we've got a population of around 6 million people and I sincerely doubt that the fact that I've put someone's name on a Twitter page is going to affect their right to a fair trial.”

Names of those arrested for DWI will be posted on District Attorney Brett Ligon's Twitter page.

Technorati Tags: Drunk Drivers, Texas, twitter news

Lindsay's New Year bikini surprise for Twitter fans – Yahoo! India News

London, Jan 2 (ANI): Lindsay Lohan has posted a New Year bikini picture for her Twitter fans.

The 'Mean Girls' star was celebrating New Year in St Barts, reports The Sun.

And she has uploaded her bikini picture for her Twitter followers, giving them a glimpse of her holiday snaps.

She also wished her followers a Happy New Year and warned them to expect more “LOHAN MAYHEM” in 2010. (ANI)

ANI

Technorati Tags: twitter news

Twitter briefly blocked by hackers – Yahoo! News

NEW YORK – Hackers briefly blocked access to the popular Internet messaging service Twitter, steering traffic to another Web site where a group reportedly calling itself the “Iranian Cyber Army” claimed responsibility.

Users trying to reach Twitter early Friday were redirected to a Web page that CNN reported had a picture of a green flag and a message that said, “This site has been hacked by the Iranian Cyber Army.”

There was no evidence the hackers are actually linked to Iran. Web sites like Twitter and Facebook helped bring attention to the Iranian opposition during the country’s crackdown after its June elections, with users posting minute-by-minute updates and amateur video.

Twitter later Friday posted a message on its blog that said its Domain Name Systems’ records “were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed.” The site says it will update with more details “once we’ve investigated more fully.”

Technorati Tags: twitter news