Since early March, we have been routing links within Direct Messages through our link service to detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of malware, phishing, and other dangers. Any link shared in a Direct Message has been wrapped with a twt.tl URL. Links reported to us as malicious are blacklisted, and we present users with a page that warns them of potentially malicious content if they click blacklisted links. We want users to have this benefit on all tweets.

Additionally, as we mentioned at our Chirp developer conference in April, if you want to share a link through Twitter, there currently isn't a way to automatically shorten it and we want to fix this. It should be easy for people to share shortened links from the Tweet box on Twitter.com.

To meet both of these goals, we're taking small steps to expand the link service currently available in Direct Messages to links shared through all Tweets. We're testing this link service now with a few Twitter employee accounts.

User Experience, Safety, and Value

When this is rolled out more broadly to users this summer, all links shared on Twitter.com or third-party apps will be wrapped with a t.co URL. A really long link such as http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 might be wrapped as http://t.co/DRo0trj for display on SMS, but it could be displayed to web or application users as amazon.com/Delivering- or as the whole URL or page title. Ultimately, we want to display links in a way that removes the obscurity of shortened link and lets you know where a link will take you.

In addition to a better user experience and increased safety, routing links through this service will eventually contribute to the metrics behind our Promoted Tweets platform and provide an important quality signal for our Resonance algorithm—the way we determine if a Tweet is relevant and interesting to users. We are also looking to provide services that make use of this data, an example would be analytics within our eventual commercial accounts service.

Early Developer Preview Comes First

As a first step, developers who create applications on the Twitter platform can now begin to prepare for this service. They will be able to choose how to display the wrapped links in a manner that is most useful, informative and appropriate for a given device or application. Our first step is a small one. We're rolling out wrapped links on a handful of accounts, including @TwitterAPI, @rsarver, and @raffi, to help developers test their code. Ultimately, every link on Twitter will be wrapped.

If you are already partial to a particular shortener when you tweet, you can continue to use it for link shortening and analytics as you normally would, and we'll wrap the shortened links you submit.

We’d like to thank our friends at .CO Internet SAS, the registry for the new .CO extension, for helping us secure t.co for use with this service. Links shared on Twitter will be safer, clearer, and more valuable.

New, improved, internationalized help center
Twitter’s user support team is a small group of 14 people and 4 engineers dedicated to helping people use Twitter. As Twitter has grown, so has the importance of making it easy to find answers to questions, updates about known issues, and the right path to escalate a problem to someone who can help. We've been working hard to improve the help experience for people everywhere, and today we're excited to launch the first iteration of our new and improved Help Center!


So what's new?
When you click help from twitter.com, you'll find the following:

• International help resources: we've translated our help documents into Spanish, French, Italian, and German. Japanese coming soon! Thanks translators, for all your hard work!

• New Look-and-Feel: we've organized articles by topics and groups to help you find what you are looking for faster. We've integrated better with Twitter, and a fresh look-and-feel makes for a happier browsing experience.

• @anywhere integration: you'll notice hovercards in article comments in your tickets! This makes it easy to follow a user, or retweet what others are saying.

• Improved Search: we've worked with Zendesk, our third-party help desk provider, to improve search response times and results.

• Regular updates on known issues: all of our known issues are listed here, updated every week by our Support team. We've also linked to Twitter's Status blog, a great resource for service updates when things have gone wrong on Twitter.com.

• Mobile help section: find out everything you need to know about using Twitter on your phone!

• Business help: answers for questions about Twitter's upcoming business features- more coming soon!

• Integration with @support and @safety: easily find updates from our @support and @safety accounts, as well as the internationalized versions of those accounts.

How it works
Twitter's support team has a cadre of engineers constantly working to improve the help experience and infrastructure. These talented folks work every day on making it easy for the support team to help people through a combination of tools and integrations.

To make it as easy as possible to find an answer without sending an email, we seek to provide all of the information you need in our Help Center. Our help writers, Emily, Ginger, and Lindsay, have added articles for every question we get so that others can benefit from seeing the answers. They've also worked with our translators to provide the same for international users.

Help articles are originally posted in Zendesk, our help ticket system and knowledge base hub. We use Zendesk's API to pull the articles into the custom pages you see on support.twitter.com. Users search for answers in the help center, and if they have a problem that needs help from a human, we provide easy paths to escalation in the articles themselves.

Specialized forms help us collect the right information to reduce steps in issue resolution, and support requests sent from the help center feed back into Zendesk, where they are categorized and escalated to the right group within our Support team. This (plus more Twitter magic from @sfjulie, @pandemona, @tildewill, @ungulation and @niels) makes it possible for our Support team to answer most requests, including international ones, within 12 hours.


Stay tuned
This is just the first round of improvements, so expect more good news soon! As always, we're trying to make things better, and we need your help! If you discover a bug or problem, send @support a direct message to let us know. Try searching for something in our help center, and if you don't find it, send a reply to @support with the question and the hash tag #foshiz, like this:

What is a retweet? #foshiz

We'll review the questions and work on adding any that we're missing. Stay tuned for even more improvement in the upcoming months- we've only just begun!

Special thanks to Zendesk, with whom we celebrated our millionth ticket in a year's time. We look forward to more good times!

One more thing...
If building scalable, intuitive help systems sounds like fun, you should join us- Twitter support is hiring engineers and agents!

Enduring Value

When we discuss the future of Twitter, we focus on the mechanisms through which we can build a platform of enduring value. The three mechanisms most important to building such a platform are architecting for extensibility, providing a robust API to the platform’s functionality, and ensuring the long-term health and value of the user experience.

The purpose of this post is to explain what we are building, how we will sustain the company and ecosystem, and where we believe there will be great opportunities for the vast ecosystem of partners.

Twitter is an open, real-time introduction and information service. On a daily basis we introduce millions to interesting people, trends, content, URLs, organizations, lists, companies, products and services. These introductions result in the formation of a dynamic real-time interest graph. At any given moment, the vast network of connections on Twitter paints a picture of a universe of interests. We follow those people, organizations, services, and other users that interest us, and in turn, others follow us.

To foster this real-time open information platform, we provide a short-format publish/subscribe network and access points to that network such as www.twitter.com, m.twitter.com and several Twitter-branded mobile clients for iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android devices. We also provide a complete API into the functions of the network so that others may create access points. We manage the integrity and relevance of the content in the network in the form of the timeline and we will continue to spend a great deal of time and money fostering user delight and satisfaction. Finally, we are responsible for the extensibility of the network to enable innovations that range from Annotations and Geo-Location to headers that can route support tickets for companies. There are over 100,000 applications leveraging the Twitter API, and we expect that to grow significantly with the expansion of the platform via Annotations in the coming months.

Our responsibilities extend from there. Twitter is responsible for the health, reliability, and scale of the network, Twitter-branded endpoints (SMS, a twitter client on the web and other most popular platforms, Twitter-branded widgets), a consistent user experience, and a sustaining revenue model for the platform. We will provide the best possible experience for each of these.

Ecosystem Clarity

We heard loud and clear at our Chirp Developer Conference last month that developers desire clarity—clarity about what we believe Twitter must provide, what Twitter looks to the ecosystem to provide, and where the lines, if any, are drawn. We have outlined above the services and responsibilities we will provide in the context of the platform. In order to provide further clarity to the ecosystem, we will also be specific about the boundaries we will draw in order to preserve the integrity, health, and value of the network.

We now employ over 200 people, and we plan to grow this investment as the opportunity demands. To sustain this investment, we have announced Promoted Tweets. These tweets will exist primarily in search and then in the timeline, but in a manner that preserves the integrity and relevance of the timeline. As we have announced, we will use innovative metrics like Resonance so that Promoted Tweets are only shown when they make sense for users and enhance the user experience.

As our primary concern is the long-term health and value of the network, we have and will continue to forgo near-term revenue opportunities in the service of carefully metering the impact of Promoted Tweets on the user experience. It is critical that the core experience of real-time introductions and information is protected for the user and with an eye toward long-term success for all advertisers, users and the Twitter ecosystem. For this reason, aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API. We are updating our Terms of Service to articulate clearly what we mean by this statement, and we encourage you to read the updated API Terms of Service to be released shortly.

Why are we prohibiting these kinds of ads? First, third party ad networks are not necessarily looking to preserve the unique user experience Twitter has created. They may optimize for either market share or short-term revenue at the expense of the long-term health of the Twitter platform. For example, a third party ad network may seek to maximize ad impressions and click through rates even if it leads to a net decrease in Twitter use due to user dissatisfaction.

Secondly, the basis for building a lasting advertising network that benefits users should be innovation, not near-term monetization. Twitter is uniquely dependent on and responsible for the long-term health and value of the platform. Accordingly, a necessary focus of Promoted Tweets is to explore ways to create value for our users. Third party ad networks may be optimized for near-term monetization at the expense of innovating or creating the best user experience. We believe it is our responsibility to encourage creative product development and to curb practices that compromise innovation.

It is important to keep in mind that Twitter bears all the costs of maintaining the network, protecting the Tweet stream against spam, supporting user requests, and scaling the service. Indeed, Twitter will bear many of the support costs associated with any third-party paid Tweets, as Twitter receives support emails related to anything a user sees in a tweet stream. The third-party bears few of these costs by comparison.

Fostering Innovation

There has never been more opportunity for innovation on the Twitter platform than there is now. In order to continue to provide clarity, our guiding principles include:

1. We don't seek to control what users tweet. And users own their own tweets.
2. We believe there are opportunities to sell ads, build vertical applications, provide breakthrough analytics, and more. Companies are selling real-time display ads or other kinds of mobile ads around the timelines on many Twitter clients, and we derive no explicit value from those ads. That’s fine. We imagine there will be all sorts of other third-party monetization engines that crop up in the vicinity of the timeline.
3. We don’t believe we always need to participate in the myriad ways in which other companies monetize the network.

Platforms evolve. When Annotations ship, there are going to be many new business opportunities on the Twitter platform in addition to those currently available. We know that companies and entrepreneurs will create things with Annotations that we couldn’t have imagined. Companies will emerge that provide all manner of rich data and meta-data services around and in Tweets. Twitter clients could begin to differentiate on their ability to service different data-rich verticals like Finance or Entertainment. Media companies in the ecosystem can begin to incorporate rich tagging capabilities. Much has been written about the opportunities afforded by Annotations because those that understand the benefits of extensible architectures understand their power and potential.

We understand that for a few of these companies, the new Terms of Service prohibit activities in which they’ve invested time and money. We will continue to move as quickly as we can to deliver the Annotations capability to the market so that developers everywhere can create innovative new business solutions on the growing Twitter platform.

We hope that this clarity of purpose, focus, and roadmap helps point a clear way forward for the thousands of companies in the Twitter ecosystem.

Comprehensive analysis of the Twitter user experience in the iTunes App Store showed very plainly that people were looking for an app from Twitter—we didn't have one so they generally got confused and gave up. Obviously, we saw room for improvement. Starting today, Twitter for iPhone and iPod touch is available for free on the iTunes App Store. Loren, Leland, and the rest of the Mobile team have artfully crafted an application that takes the Twitter experience to a whole new level of awesomeness. We hope you'll love it like we do.

Something worth noting is that you don't need a Twitter account to enjoy this application. Browsing trends, reading Top Tweets, finding popular users, and checking out public tweets geographically nearby are all possible immediately upon download. Discovery and consumption of interesting, relevant information is a central focus. However, quick and easy signup exists within the application so new users won't need to visit our web site to create an account. Oh, and 日本語版Twitter for iPhoneを公開してます...With more languages on the way!





Download Twitter for iPhone on the iTunes App Store today.

If you're a Twitter developer, then we invite you to read our engineering blog regularly. Even if you're on the mailing lists and IRC, or already following @twitterapi, the eng blog is a good resource. On Wednesday, Raffi blogged about changes that impact developers regarding requirements around authentication. This is the kind of information anyone working on the Twitter platform is going to want to know. If you get a chance, check it out.

When we tweet what’s happening around us, we share not only our thoughts, but also web pages, photos, videos, location...anything. Mobile phones are increasingly part of our lives, and we seem to be doing everything but making phone calls. Reading the news, watching a YouTube video, and taking photos at events like the World Cup are things we expect to do on mobile phones – sharing our experiences on these little screens should be just as easy and fast as on big ones.

When apps work well with each other, sharing becomes as second nature on machines as it does in person. The Android platform is really good at that, and we’ve worked with the Android team to make it super easy to share what’s happening. Today we are excited to announce that Twitter for Android is available in Android Market!

Twitter for Android is a fantastic application to use, and sharing any link or photo is super simple too – just look for the share button in your favorite application and choose Twitter.

Reading tweets is easy in a bunch of places on your phone. Quickly access your timeline with the home screen widget, view a tweet location on a map, and see your friend’s latest tweet in your phonebook, GoogleTalk list or any application that uses Android’s QuickContact bar.

Check out the screenshots to see it in action.




We had a great time working with the Android team and are thrilled that Google will be open sourcing the code used in this app in the near future. We look forward to the amazing experiences developers will create using Twitter APIs in their upcoming Android apps.

This is just the beginning. We’ll be creating more great ways to read, find, and share what's happening on your Android phone soon!

(The Twitter for Android app is available for phones running Android 2.1 and above - just scan the barcode to the right. Don't forget, you can always visit http://mobile.twitter.com/ on your phone to use Twitter)

This Friday April 30th it's Giants vs Rockies at San Francisco and we're throwing our first ever official baseball tweetup together with the Giants at AT&T Park. Lots of us from Twitter HQ are going to walk over to the stadium to meet before the game and we would love for you to join us! Tickets for the tweetup plus the game are less expensive than the regular game tickets, and $2 from each ticket purchased will be donated to one of our local partners, Room to Read.

Malaria threatens one half of the world's population, resulting in 350 million cases each year and nearly one million deaths on an annual basis—many of them children. World Malaria day is this Sunday, and the impact of organizations devoted to the cause has already begun. In partnership with Malaria No More and The Case Foundation, Twitter is offering a way to help put an end to this disease. You can help starting today with just one tweet.

A worker in Tanzania inspects mosquito nets before delivery.

When you send a tweet about Malaria and pledge your donation of $10, you are providing a life-saving bed net to protect against this mosquito-borne infections disease. Your generous donation will be matched by The Case Foundation, providing the opportunity to double the impact of each tweet. For more information about Twitter and the fight against Malaria, visit our Hope140 site dedicated to helping all of us become a force for good.

Twitter was inspired by SMS and we continue to embrace this simple but ubiquitous technology. In fact, Twitter's 140 character limit was designed specifically to allow for any tweet to be read in its entirety whether you're using a rudimentary mobile phone, or a more sophisticated Internet enabled device.

Over the last eight months we have been working with a startup called Cloudhopper to become one of the highest volume SMS programs in the world—Twitter processes close to a billion SMS tweets per month and that number is growing around the world from Indonesia to Australia, the UK, the US, and beyond.

To help us further grow and scale our SMS service, we are happy to announce the acquisition of Cloudhopper, a messaging infrastructure company that enables Twitter to connect directly to mobile carrier networks in countries all over the planet. Please join us in welcoming both Joe and Kristin to Twitter's mobile team.


Local businesses use the power of Twitter SMS

Last month we previewed an incredibly simple set of web tools which enable partner websites to easily integrate Twitter functionality into their site experience called @anywhere. The idea is that web users will be able to engage with existing Twitter features from all of their favorite sites. Today, we're happy to announce this service is live and ready for anyone who wants to build a little Twitter into their online experience.

Our friends at Foursquare call @anywhere "aggressively simple." Other partners like Amazon are excited that customers can "conveniently follow suggested Twitter accounts without ever leaving" the shopping experience. Bing implements the new tools so users can "seamlessly interact with Twitter." HuffPo already went all-out and built a Twitter edition and the WSJ.com told us, they hope @anywhere "will help us connect readers with the broader story."

Citysearch says that @anywhere "will help our users get a complete real-time snapshot of a merchant and, when they'd like, engage that merchant via Twitter directly from our site. And, in the UK, The Guardian is using @anywhere to innovatively connect readers with those running for public office: "Now, from within our pages you can ask questions your prospective parliamentary candidates and of our journalists. This is a clear indication of how we're trying to lower barriers between our audience and those who hold power or seek to hold office, and between our readers and our journalists."

The full list of sites who have been working on @anywhere implementations pre-public launch include AdAge, Amazon, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, Disqus, eBay, Foursquare, Gawker, Google, Gowalla, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Hunch, Mashable, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, WSJ.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube.

We'll soon be highlighting their integrations here and at media.twitter.com. Let's see what you can do with @anywhere. We can't wait.