New Twitter Funding

There's a lot of talk today about our financing. Yesterday we closed a significant round of funding with a group of investment firms that we're excited to publicly thank: Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Morgan Stanley.

It was important to us that we find investment partners who share our vision for building a company of enduring value. Twitter's journey has just begun and we are committed to building the best product, technology, and company possible. I'm proud of the team we've built so far and I'm confident in the future we'll build together.

One More Thing: Twitter+AOL

Like we said earlier today, people should read or write tweets wherever they prefer and there's a large portion of Internet users who prefer AOL. As a proud partner in AOL Lifestream, Twitter will be smoothly integrated into AIM, Bebo, and AOL.com. Some of your other favorite services like YouTube, Flickr, Digg, and Facebook are also part of the action. Did I mention that our Platform team has working overtime lately? We love those guys!

MySpace Gets Twitterized!

There are tens of thousands of mobile, desktop, and web applications creating a variety of ways to interact with Twitter on your favorite device or service. We think people should read or write tweets wherever they prefer so we work with social networks, mobile networks, television networks, and search engines to make that happen. This week, fans of MySpace have started taking their @usernames with them by syncing their accounts with Twitter.

When you sync your MySpace account with Twitter, you'll be able to update your status as you normally would from your home page, status and mood page, or mobile phone. When you update your status on MySpace it will also update Twitter—and, the reverse is true. We're already seeing many accounts syncing up and we expect more to follow. Kudos to Ryan Sarver and the Twitter platform team for helping to get this worked out with our friends at MySpace.

Four More Themes

If you like using Twitter.com as your Twitter client, then you might be interested to know that we've added four more themes to the design collection. We've also updated the default theme and avatar to match our front page. If you prefer the classic default theme, it's still there and you can change it back. To change your Twitter page design, visit Settings > Design.

Twitter's New Terms of Service

At the start, critics often said, "Twitter is fun, but it's not useful." At one point @ev responded dryly with, "Neither is ice cream." Things have come a long way in a short time. We recognized potential early but users and platform developers would demonstrate how much more Twitter could be. Fostering an open and increasingly important network is not as easily dismissed as it once was—but it's still fun!

Now that we know more about how Twitter is being used, we've made changes to our Terms of Service—these are the basic rules that go along with using Twitter. The revisions more appropriately reflect the nature of Twitter and convey key issues such as ownership. For example, your tweets belong to you, not to Twitter. With these revisions, we expect some discussion so here are a few highlights from the updated page.

Advertising—In the Terms, we leave the door open for advertising. We'd like to keep our options open as we've said before.

Ownership—Twitter is allowed to "use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute" your tweets because that's what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you.

APIs—The apps that have grown around the Twitter platform are flourishing and adding value to the ecosystem. You authorize us to make content available via our APIs. We're also working on guidelines for use of the API.

SPAM—Abusive behavior and spam is also outlined in these terms according to the rules we've been operating under for some time.

These updates complement the spirit of Twitter. If we've left something out, or the nature of the service changes, then we'll revisit the Terms—there's a feedback link on the page. We're in the process of sending an email about the revisions now. It's important that everyone who tweets, develops apps, or is simply interested in Twitter understands that it's not about the technology, it's about how we all use the service that matters most.

140: The Twitter Conference LA

Alex Payne, Ryan Sarver myself, and a whole bunch of Twitter enthusiasts ranging from businesses to celebrities will be gathering at a Twitter conference in Los Angeles later next month. If you're interested in joining us, check it out. The exact date is September 22nd-23rd, 2009, at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. Alex and Ryan work on our platform team without which all the cool Twitter apps we use and love would not be possible. We're looking forward to sharing information, discussing ideas, and hanging out a bit. If that's not enough, there's an open bar on the first night.

Twitter Sesh

Check out this funny video Ben Stiller (@redhourBen) made with Ryan Seacrest (@RyanSeacrest). "Yeah, why don't you come on Idol because that will help me. You showing up on American Idol. Again."

Twitter Wit

There's a new book out called Twitter Wit featuring "the Funniest Tweets of All Time." When Nick Douglas asked us about his ambitious plan to curate this collection it sounded good provided the right permissions were in place—and only if it was funny! After reading a draft, we bought copies for everyone at Twitter HQ. The tweets are irreverent, inappropriate, geeky, and pretty much hilarious. If you don't like one, you'll like the next. Twitter Wit is one of those books you can't help reading aloud to friends. Like this: "Why should I be the one to take the kids to see the their psychologist? I don't even love them!" via @fireland.

We have no financial arrangement with the publisher but Nick invited me to write the book's foreward. The first few pages of Twitter Wit provided an opportunity to share some behind the scenes perspective and highlight the significance of humor as a meaningful part of communication. The most important contribution I could make was to celebrate the team here at Twitter HQ as well as everyone around the world sharing, discovering, and building on the service. Nevertheless, @pagecrusher's question remains unanswered: "Why aren't martini glasses shaped so that they don’t spill so easily on the bus?" Also, there's a contest.