Domain Name System or DNS is an Internet protocol used to translate IP addresses into domain names so instead of typing in a long string of numbers we can enter urls like www.twitter.com into a browser to visit our favorite web sites. Last night, DNS settings for the Twitter web site were hijacked. From 9:46pm to 11pm PST, approximately 80% of Traffic to Twitter.com was redirected to other web sites. We tweeted, blogged, and updated our status page last night.

During the attack, we were in direct contact with our DNS provider, Dynect. We worked closely to reset our DNS as quickly as possible. The motive for this attack appears to have been focused on defacing our site, not aimed at users—we don't believe any accounts were compromised. If you're concerned that your account could have been affected in some way, feel free to contact us, accountsafe [at] twitter.com.

As we tweeted a bit ago, Twitter's DNS records were temporarily compromised tonight but have now been fixed. As some noticed, Twitter.com was redirected for a while but API and platform applications were working. We will update with more information and details once we've investigated more fully.

They both have carriers that launched Twitter's Text Messaging service today. We are excited to announce that our friends at 3 Indonesia and O2 Ireland have both made the Twitter SMS service available to their subscribers without any additional fees. Sending and receiving text messages with Twitter is just like sending and receiving them with your friends. It's a simple way to tell the world what's happening while out and about by quickly sending a text message to Twitter. Additionally, users can turn on text notifications for individual people they follow as well as, direct messages.

Customers of 3 Indonesia have exciting additional functionality available. 3 is the first carrier in Indonesia to support sending photos to Twitter via MMS by incorporating TwitPic. Give it a try today on your 3 Indonesia phone by sending "START" to 89887.

O2 is the first carrier to launch Twitter SMS in Ireland so, if you are a lucky O2 Ireland customer send "START" to 51210 and either sign up for Twitter or activate your phone with your current Twitter username. Also, be sure to check out all of the cool commands we support.

More countries and carriers are coming soon. Check here to see which countries and carriers currently support Twitter Text Messaging.

Deutsch ist eine der weitverbreitetsten Sprachen der EU und ist die letzte Sprache, die wir im Jahr 2009 auf Twitter.com einführen.

Mit der unentbehrlichen Hilfe unserer vielen fantastischen Übersetzer und Übersetzerinnen, haben wir fünf neue Sprachen in weniger als zwei Monate eingeführt - eine riesen Leistung für unsere Internationalisierungsgruppe. Umso schneller wir Twitter für Leute überall auf der Welt zugänglich machen, desto schneller die verschiedenen Kulturen der Welt den globalen Gespräch auf Twitter beeinflussen können.

Hier sind ein paar deutschsprachige Benutzer, die sich schon aktiv auf Twitter engagieren und Dich vielleicht interessieren:

@SPIEGEL_Eil—deutsche Zeitschrift
@Paulvandyk—Grammy nominierter DJ aus Berlin
@silenttiffy—deutsche Schriftstellerin
@Dieternuhr—Kabarettist und Moderator
@Calmund—langjähriger Bundesliga-Manager

Um Deine Sprachpräferenzen einzustellen, besuche Deine Einstellungsseite und wähle Deutsch im Aufklappmenü "Sprache" aus. Die ganze Web-Oberfläche wird sich sofort übersetzen! Als nächster Schritt, besuche und folge dem offizielen "Twitter auf Deutsch" Profil, @Twitter_De. So können unsere deutsche Benutzer sich über Neuigkeiten bei Twitter auf dem Laufenden halten. Zuletzt, sag Deinen Freunden Bescheid und geh voran und twittere!

My name is Abdur and I'm part of the Research team here at Twitter. As Chief Scientist, it's my job to interpret data so we can understand and appreciate how Twitter is constantly evolving. Since it's the end of the year, we thought it would be interesting to review the topics and issues that captured global attention over the year. In 2009, Twitter’s Trending Topics helped us understand what was happening around the world showing us that people everywhere can be united in concern around important events; excited about a new movie; or geek-out about a major new technology.

Among all the keywords, hashtags, and phrases that proliferated throughout the year, one topic surfaced repeatedly. Twitter users found the Iranian elections the most engaging topic of the year. The terms #iranelection, Iran and Tehran were all in the top-21 of Trending Topics, and #iranelection finished in a close second behind the regular weekly favorite #musicmonday.

These are Twitter’s top Trending Topics across several categories—an interesting time capsule of what was happening as this decade came to a close.

News Events
1. #iranelection
2. Swine Flu
3. Gaza
4. Iran
5. Tehran
6. #swineflu
7. AIG
8. #uksnow
9. Earth Hour
10. #inaug09

People
1. Michael Jackson
2. Susan Boyle
3. Adam Lambert
4. Kobe (Bryant)
5. Chris Brown
6. Chuck Norris
7. Joe Wilson
8. Tiger Woods
9. Christian Bale
10. A-Rod (Alex Rodriguez)

Movies
1. Harry Potter
2. New Moon
3. District 9
4. Paranormal Activity
5. Star Trek
6. True Blood
7. Transformers 2
8. Watchmen
9. Slumdog Millionaire
10. G.I. Joe

TV Shows
1. American Idol
2. Glee
3. Teen Choice Awards
4. SNL (Saturday Night Live)
5. Dollhouse
6. Grey’s Anatomy
7. VMAS (Video Music Awards)
8. #bsg (Battlestar Galatica)
9. BET Awards
10. Lost

Sports (Teams, Events, Leagues)
1. Super Bowl
2. Lakers
3. Wimbledon
4. Cavs (Cleveland Cavaliers)
5. Superbowl
6. Chelsea
7. NFL
8. UFC 100
9. Yankees
10. Liverpool

Technology
1. Google Wave
2. Snow Leopard
3. Tweetdeck
4. Windows 7
5. CES
6. Palm Pre
7. Google Latitude
8. #E3
9. #amazonfail
10. Macworld

Hash Tags
1. #musicmonday
2. #iranelection
3. #sxsw
4. #swineflu
5. #nevertrust
6. #mm
7. #rememberwhen
8. #3drunkwords
9. #unacceptable
10. #iwish

My name is Anamitra and I work in the product team at Twitter. For some time now, businesses of all sizes have been using Twitter to deepen their engagement with customers. The simple features that Twitter has offered to all users has worked for business users as well. As Twitter becomes more integral to businesses, they will need more business specific features from Twitter – both on the web and API. We have been working on some of these features and are ready to start a limited beta test of one that's further along in development.

The feature we are beta testing is called 'Contributors' – it enables users to engage in more authentic conversations with businesses by allowing those organizations to manage multiple contributors to their account. The feature appends the contributor's username to the tweet byline, making the business to consumer communication more personal; e.g. if @Twitter invites @Biz to tweet on its behalf, then a tweet from @Twitter would include @Biz in the byline so that users know more about the real people behind organizations.



Its functionality will be fully supported by the API and will enhance the many Twitter business apps, such as CoTweet and HootSuite.

It's Not Ready For Prime Time

This feature is one of several in development; some of them will be visible to regular users and some of them will not. Our goal at this time is to get basic feedback from business users and ecosystem partners. The beta will be released to a limited subset of folks for some time so that we can get an idea of how the features work from a system perspective. After we kick the tires a bit, we'll do a full launch to all business users and ecosystem partners. Stay tuned!

Siamo emozionati perché oggi con il lancio della versione italiana del nostro sito diventiamo ancora di più una piattaforma di comunicazione globale. Come sempre, desideriamo ringraziare tutti i traduttori che hanno partecipato al progetto e che ci hanno mostrato la loro bravura.

Potrete seguire famosi giornalisti come @beppesevergnini oppure radio come @radiodeejay, la radio di Linus & C. o ancora una delle più famose cantanti italiane, Laura Pausini (@officialpausini).

Ora che le conversazioni su Twitter si arricchiscono di punti di vista sempre più diversificati a livello globale, il network di informazioni continuerà a crescere in ogni angolo e fessura del pianeta. Più eventi saranno condivisi, più conoscenza e consapevolezza si diffonderà e i milioni di persone che alimentano Twitter influenzeranno altri milioni di persone con i loro tweet.

E quale modo migliore di festeggiare il lancio di Twitter in Italia? Un bel Tweetup a base di pizza, amici e tweet. I nostri amici di @pizzatwit saranno felici di organizzare un pizza party e se volete incontrare un sacco di nuovi amici e twittare tutta notte, vi consigliamo di seguire il loro account e di aiutarli ad organizzare uno dei loro famosi Twitter Pizza Party!

Per usare Twitter in italiano, andate nelle vostre impostazioni e selezionate la lingua dal menù a tendina. Buon divertimento!

It’s not uncommon to stumble upon a store that encourages its customers to follow them on Twitter. Without even looking I see this happening more and more, which says a lot about the wonderfully simple concept of doing business on Twitter.

Today, Citysearch has integrated Twitter into their service so local businesses can display Tweets right within their Citysearch profile, and customers viewing the profile can even Tweet back right from there. Potential customers can make smarter decisions with the fresh information being shared with them in real time, and businesses can manage closer connections with audiences across the Web.

Simplicity along with the smart creations from third parties like Citysearch are making it more than handy for businesses to have a presence on Twitter.

Hi all, this is @leland, user experience lead on the @twittermobile team. I wanted to share a little bit of what we've been working on and thinking about.

It’s probably no secret that Twitter has an active developer community, using our APIs to create fantastically innovative apps. Nor is it a secret that Twitter and mobile phones go together like birds and flight.

What may be a less known fact is: Lots of people access Twitter on their phones via our good ol’ mobile website, and trusty ‘m’ has been delivering tweets faithfully. However, ‘m’ doesn’t fully feel like Twitter, and could probably do a bit more things for you.

‘M’ should also be fantastically innovative — naturally the best way to do that is use our own APIs. So, the mobile team here built a brand new mobile web client from scratch, using only Twitter APIs, and we'd like to share the results with you.

Our new mobile web site is previewing today, just point your phone’s browser to http://mobile.twitter.com. Its got a great new look, and has some great new touches that will make your mobile experience on Twitter a bit more fun and a lot more helpful. Let us know if you agree and especially tell us how we can make it better.

This preview works best on @Webkit browsers – Android, iPhone, Nokia S60 and Palm Web OS phones all come with these browsers installed. Other browsers like @BlackBerry work too, but we haven't done all the fine tuning yet.

As this preview becomes ready for prime-time, we will start switching everyone who uses ‘m’ in phases to automatically receive the new mobile web client.

This is just the start, we’re excited about the new APIs launching at Twitter, and have been busy tinkering with some neat ways to use them. We look forward to sharing more cool things with you soon.

Over the course of several meetings with the dedicated people behind (RED) we have learned a lot about fighting AIDS in Africa. Personally, I was struck by how effective treatment can be—someone on death's door can be brought back to life in as little as 90 days. This transformation is called the Lazarus Effect and it has more impact than you can imagine. When someone is treated, they can go back to being a mom, they can go back to their job, or to school. Fighting the disease at a large scale means positive changes not just for individuals but also socially and economically as people return to productive lives.

This amazing transformation comes from two pills daily at a cost of forty cents per day. Our friends at (Product)Red are making it easy for us to help fight AIDS by partnering with companies that make the products we buy already. For example, these red laces Nike designed to both raise awareness and help financially. At Twitter, we're making it fun and easy to spread the word about this preventable and treatable disease that is hitting Africa the hardest. If you use any of the following terms below today on Twitter your tweet will turn red. Today is World AIDS day, help us spread the word.

#red 100% of the monies generated by (RED) partners and events goes directly to fund programs to fight AIDS in Africa
@joinred is the official account of the (RED) campaign
40 cents a day can keep someone with AIDS alive
World AIDS Day is the perfect day to tweet for a cause
AIDS is preventable and treatable
HIV affects 33 million people around the world
#laceupsavelives is Nike's own campaign

We've also created a red theme which you can switch to in your profile settings. Don't forget to follow @joinred to stay informed. Here are some of the success stories.