Wordy Birdie is a game that works within Twitter. The creator, Dan Grigsby describes it as "part buzzword bingo, part drinking game." You earn points by predicting what words people you follow will use in their updates.

There's a shiny new update to the popular Mac OS Twitter application, Twitterrific. You can download Twitterrific 3.1 here.

Update: We were testing a new application server tonight that didn't work right so we rolled it back. Lots of folks saw an error page while we were fixing the bug—which is a bummer.

Some folks experienced a more dramatic error which had them accidentally updating other people's Twitter—this is a more serious issue which crosses into the realm of security. We took this very seriously, acted quickly, and learned from our mistake.

We hope our error didn't put you out too much tonight. We're pulling together the team and analyzing how we made this mistake so we can avoid this error next time.

Users have reported some oddness in their Twitter timeline in the last few minutes—specifically, they're seeing updates they don't normally see. We're tracking this and working on a fix. We'll keep you posted.

While we're working on this, you might see the "Something is technically wrong" page. Thanks for bearing with us.

I recently visited the beautiful cities of Barcelona and Madrid while attending the Mobile World Congress (née 3GSM). My favorite part of the trip was when I was able to sit down to dinner with the 2 founders of Twittmad and 2 members of the newspaper adn. Twittmad is a Twitter user group in Madrid which meets monthly and draws over 100 passionate Twitter users! It became so successful that the founders started similar meet-ups in Barcelona, Seville, and now Tokyo, all under the Twittday umbrella.

Looks like Starbucks is currently closed due to a scheduled down time. Not the web site, the physical stores—all of them!

All American Starbucks shops will shut down this evening between 5:30 and 9 p.m. local time to conduct what the company is calling "a historic in-store education and training event."

Interesting to see actual bricks-and-morter operations like Starbucks scheduling down time (aside from the normal hours they are closed). I wonder what sort of signs they put up for folks showing up for coffee?

Lots of folks are marveling at this real-life mashup between a houseplant, a mobile phone, and Twitter. The smarty-pants over at Botanicalls have created a very interesting monster—when your plant needs water, it sends out a Twitter update that reaches you anywhere in the world. And once it's received water, it sends out another by way of thanks.If you want to hook your own plants up to Twitter, Make Magazine has created this handy how-to. Also, if you're really looking for a good time, you can follow this plant on Twitter. It hasn't been watered in 3 days. What will happen!?

Los grandes eventos como el Súpermartes en Estados Unidos generan muchas conversaciones en Twitter. Es fácil seguir a otros usuarios en Twitter, y también es fácil ver en Twitter la "gran foto", el conjunto de conversaciones generadas alrededor de un evento, para colocar los eventos históricos en perspectiva.

ADN.es se lanza al reto de las conversaciones en tiempo real usando Twitter. En concreto, se alía con Twitter para contar todo lo que rodea las elecciones generales del 9 de marzo. ADN.es muestra las conversaciones alrededor de las elecciones en su portada, en tiempo real, al ritmo que ocurren. La primera apuesta tiene lugar siguiendo el histórico debate entre los dos principales candidatos a la presidencia del Gobierno, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero y Mariano Rajoy, en directo mientras el debate se emite por televisión.

Si vives en España o estás interesado en estas elecciones, ¡no puedes perdértelo! Habrá dos debates antes de las elecciones. El primero es hoy, a las 22.00 hora de Madrid. El segundo es el 3 de marzo, a las 22.00 hora de Madrid. Las elecciones, en: http://www.adn.es/politica/elecciones_2008/debate

Thanks to @davidalvarez for the translation! The English version follows.

Spanish General Elections on Twitter

Big Events like Super Tuesday in the United States generate lots of conversation on Twitter. While it's easy to follow others on Twitter, it can be more challenging to see the bigger picture--to put the larger conversation in perspective.

The Spanish online newspaper, ADN.es has risen to the challenge of exposing the conversations happening on Twitter. Specifically, conversations associated with the general elections on March 9th. ADN.es will display general election conversation on their home page as they are happening on Twitter in real time along with the debates as they are televised.

If you're living in Spain or otherwise interested in these elections, this is not to be missed! There will be two debates leading up to the general elections. The first debate is today at 22.00 Madrid time. The second debate is March 3rd at 22.00 Madrid time. The elections: http://www.adn.es/politica/elecciones_2008/debate

This new Twitter application called StrawPoll is really neat. Follow strawpoll on Twitter and every day around 8am EST it will ask you a simple question. Reply with your answer and the pretty graph on the front page will get updated so you can see the results of everyone who is participating.

Yes, you can follow SnoopDogg on Twitter. More importantly, you can grab this new Twitter Badge that translates you and your friends updates into Snoop speak. And just in time too--it was getting tiresome having to do all that translation manually.

Twitter's traffic comes from SMS, Instant Message, Mobile Web, and all those wonderful API projects out there. However, we also have good old-fashioned web traffic. 60% of our web traffic comes from outside the United States and this chart shows the top ten non-US sources.

Update: Remember this is just web traffic. It doesn't include any of the other popular ways that people use Twitter. For example, Australia ranks 6th if we look at SMS usage. We'd get altogether different numbers if we looked at instant messaging, m.twitter.com, and API devices such as Twitterrific.

If you get bored of reading about Twitter here at our official blog, be sure to check out Oh, Twitter—a blog about Twitter published by two people who met on Twitter.

We added a little swoosh icon after updates in your timeline. Clicking it inserts @username into the update field so you can react more easily to a person you're following.

Profile pictures were offline for 2-3 minutes very early in the morning US time. The outage was related to a service interruption at Amazon Web Services which Twitter uses to host profile images.

Amazon has a goal of 99.9% uptime with this service. This translates to 45 minutes per month of expected downtime. Achieving 99.9% uptime is a significant challenge—but worth striving towards!

The Economist magazine recently published a flattering article about Twitter. The article was titled A-Twitter and it compared Twitter to a form of abbreviated communication used by foreign correspondents in the first half of the 20th century called cablese.

The Economist celebrated the restraints imposed by Twitter as "a strength," referring to our character limit as "poetic form." We like that! Finally, the piece declares Twitter "hard to dismiss." That's the stuff!

Lots of folks are noticing a little feature we added for Valentine's Day. Send @username along with <3 and see what happens!

David Troy's Twitter API project, Twittervision will be opening at the MoMA in New York City on Tuesday as part of a show called Design and the Elastic Mind.

Design and the Elastic Mind explores the relationship between science and design in the contemporary world, comprising more than 200 design objects and concepts that marry scientific research with consideration of human limitations, habits and aspirations.

There's a Media Preview on Tuesday, February 19 if you're a reporter-type person. After that, the show is open from February 24 to May 12, 2008. For more info, visit Moma.org. Congratulations to David for being recognized for creating such a compelling project.

Over the weekend we made a bunch of bug fixes and improvements to Twitter which resulted in more reliability in message delivery—this increased overall traffic.

Ordinarily, increased reliability and traffic is a good thing. However, this comprehensive delivery of messages together with two severe cases of abuse strained Twitter's primary database enough to degrade performance.

Today we worked to address these performance and reliability issues. We also took notes and preventative measures so Twitter will be smarter about this stuff next time.

The web site is feeling snappy and back to normal which means we will now be investigating and finding a fix for the SMS issues which some folks have been reporting.

It doesn't always feel like it while we're digging in and making small improvements but we are building a better, more reliable service every time we fix a bug.

Tobacco Free Florida has built Qwitter, a Twitter-powered social tool designed to help people quit smoking. By prefacing your updates with @iquit you can keep a simple journal and even better--track your progress. Qwitter will build a graph based on your updates. To learn exactly how it works, visit the Qwitter Get Started page.

And useful too. Commuter Feed is a free service that lets you see reports on traffic incidents in your local area using Twitter. Visit the site and click the "How It Works" tab for information on how to participate.

Check out DearLazy.com, "When you have a question and are convinced that someone out there has already done the research and knows the answer you turn to asking the LazyWeb for advice." Ben has noticed that lots of folks already use Twitter as an easy way to ask the LazyWeb so he created a new service that improves upon that use case.


Dearlazyweb is a personal tool which works over Twitter for querying the LazyWeb. It takes any message you send it and allows every Twitter user a chance to answer. Check out the help page for more information about how it works. To get the most out of Dear LazyWeb you need to have a Twitter account and must follow dearlazyweb.

Update: The AT&T issue has been cleared up and messages are flowing through fast and furious now.

We received word from our partner at Ericsson that there's an ongoing disturbance affecting SMS traffic over AT&T. For those of us who use AT&T to interact with Twitter over SMS, this is not great news. However, technicians are working on the problem now and Ericsson is throwing in their support as well. We'll keep you posted.

Twitter has hired another amazing engineer (and just in time, too). Robey came in over the weekend along with the rest of the eng and ops team to work on bugs—especially those that might be related to the case of the missing updates. In fact, Robey discovered what looks to have been the key: a timeout in Starling, the message queue server we recently open sourced.

Robey and Britt fixed the timeout and we're watching now as messages find their proper destinations. However, we'll wait to officially declare victory until this continues for a convincing amount of time and the team has had some rest. Good work Robey, and welcome to Twitter.

Our engineering and operations team is working tonight and through the weekend on a bug that essentially has some people missing friend updates. Our big infrastructure move helped in many ways but also introduced new bugs.

The primary focus of our activity this weekend is to permanently fix this particulary annoying bug. Today we noticed some database inconsistencies—those are related and being addressed now. We'll continue to keep you posted as we make improvements.

Sandy is a virtual assistant that works over Twitter—She remembers details so you can focus on what's important. Sandy is an innovative service from the same folks who created Stikkit. The way the Twitter integration works is that you follow Sandy, she follows you back, and then you can interact with her over Twitter.For example, say you wanted to remember something while you are out. You can send a direct text message to Sandy—her Twitter username is just the letter "s" so it's really short and easy to text. Let's say you wanted to remember to do something in 15 minutes, your exchange with Sandy over SMS might look something like this.

You: d s hi
Sandy: Hi, I'm Sandy, your personal assistant.
You: remember lunch with biz in 15 mins

In 15 minutes, you'll be reminded that we're having lunch together. Try it out, you can create an account here and learn more about interacting with Sandy over Twitter here.

Have you tried out TweetStats? You can use TweetStats to graph your own Twitter updates. I discovered that I update via Text Message as much as I do via Web. Graph your Tweets! That's a neat service.

This graph shows the number of mentions each candidate received in Twitter updates during a 4 hour period on the evening of Super Tuesday. Each candidates' share is expressed as a percentage of the total messages sent mentioning any candidate. For Gov. Romney and Sen. Clinton, an update was included if it mentioned either the first or last name of the candidate.

We know about and are currently investigating an issue some people are having regarding updates not getting delivered consistently.

Our big infrastructure move recently has done wonders with respect to maintaining a reliable service during shared events like the Super Bowl and Super Tuesday. However, we are still fixing bugs related to the move.

We're tracking the missing updates issue now as a team and we've made some progress. The updates are in our database so they're not actually missing—the problem is in the delivery. Our support team can manually clear individual timeline caches to temporarily reveal some of the 'missing' updates but that's obviously not a real fix.

We're getting closer to the answer. To the people who are experiencing this issue, thank you for writing in to support and Satisfaction. We are aware of it and will keep you posted.

Super Tuesday was another big day for Twitter. Here's a chart showing the percent of activity increase over normal daily activity. Like the Super Bowl graph, we've annotated the peaks with the corresponding events related to the primaries.

We're on a roll after looking up that Super Bowl information. This graph illustrates the distribution of relationships in Twitter—specifically the number of people folks follow as well as how many people are following them.

So, if you have about 10 followers and you're following about 10 people then you're Twittering away with a solid 50% of others like you using Twitter. If have more than 80 followers and you're following more than 70 people then you are in the Twitter minority—about 10%.

As expected, Super Bowl Sunday was an active day on Twitter. We thought we'd share some info about the day. This graph shows the percentage of updates per minute during the big game normalized to the average number of updates per minute during the rest of the day.

The blue line represents updates during the Super Bowl and the green line represents updates during the same time the Sunday before. The updates per minute are smoothed to 5 minute rolling averages and we've annotated the spikes so you can see what people were Twittering about. It's fun to see the real-time nature of Twitter updates during the shared event.

Check out this Super Twitter Tuesday Google Map — inspired by the always entertaining Twittervision, The folks at Google worked their map magic to make this Super Tuesday even more super with the addition of real-time updates from Twitter animated over a map of the United States.

From the The Official Google Blog: "We've joined forces with Twitter to give you instant updates on Super Tuesday. Instead of sitting on the sidelines, you can send a simple text message about your voting experience. Huge turnout? Taking too long in line? Did you just vote for the first time? We want it all, if you can keep to 140 characters or less."

We have a stated goal to make Twitter a reliable global communication utility. While we continue to grow around the world, reliability is our most important measurement of success. In order to become a utility that people will use every day for more reasons than we could ever imagine, we need to earn trust.

We're proud to announce our strategic alliance with a company known for reliability. A subdivision of the historic Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, NTT America is part of an organization capable of restoring power to an entire nation in the wake of devastating natural disasters.

This history of reliability and global perspective attracted Twitter to NTT America Enterprise Hosting Services. As Twitter grows and more people around the world depend on our infrastructure, we feel an increased responsibility to make the right decisions for the people who have helped make us a success as well as those who have yet to discover our service.

Thanks for you patience and kind words while we move toward our goals. We're very excited about this alliance and will keep you posted as we move forward with this relationship and all the projects we plan to tackle together.