As Twitter grows, the challenge of staying simple and relevant requires vision and leadership. This is true in all aspects of our growing company—from engineering, to product, business operations, support, and the creative force that pulls it all together. Our new creative force is Doug Bowman, former Visual Design Lead at Google.

Doug joins Twitter as our Creative Director, the role formerly occupied by myself before our team started getting big enough that it made sense for me to align more with Evan, our CEO on the company-building aspects of Twitter. We both remain involved in product decisions and are huge fans of Doug.

Doug Bowman has a personal philosophy that design plays a primary role in the interpretation of a message. Twitter is the messaging system we didn't know we needed until we had it so this philosophy is extremely fitting. Creativity is an infinitely renewable resource and Doug embodies that completely. Welcome, Doug!

We're updating the Replies feature and referring to it instead as Mentions. In your Twitter sidebar you'll now see your own @username tab. When you click that tab, you'll see a list of all tweets referencing your account with the @username convention anywhere in the tweet—instead of only at the beginning which is how it used to work. So for me it would be all mentions of @biz. For developers, this update will also be included in the APIs.

Why The Update?

The @Replies feature was introduced because we noticed lots of folks putting the @ symbol in front of Twitter usernames as a way of addressing one another. For example: @biz what are you drinking in your avatar? (It's a soy latte.) So, we started linking the @username references and collecting any tweets that began with @username on one page to make them easier to track.

However, folks started getting more inventive as they often do. Now people include @username mentions in the middle of tweets as a way to simply reference another account. For example: I'm flying @jetblue to Boston. Also, folks reference multiple accounts in a single tweet like this: I'm flying @jetblue to Boston with @ev @crystal and @goldman.

Today's update better reflects how folks are using Twitter now.

Extending the power of the real-time network globally through the simple technology of SMS is a driving goal for Twitter. Anyone in the world can update Twitter via SMS but receiving tweets on your mobile has been restricted to North America. Today, we're happy to announce an agreement between Vodafone UK and Twitter. The shortcode for UK Vodafone customers is 86444 and you can activate your mobile in your Twitter settings.

What's The Deal?

Vodafone UK has signed an agreement with Twitter allowing customers to send and receive SMS updates at no additional cost. Sending tweets from your mobile will be part of your normal text messaging bundle with Vodafone—there will be no extra fees. In fact, for the first few weeks, sending tweets won't even affect your bundle. Receiving tweets via SMS on your mobile is totally free. Vodafone loves Twitter!

Making Progress

In the United States, folks can send and receive tweets via SMS at no extra charge. In Canada, Bell Mobility customers can do the same. Now Vodafone customers in the UK can send and receive tweets. Twitter will continue to make arrangements with operators around the world so hopefully your country and your mobile provider will be next!

About a month or so ago we noticed a certain percentage of new users were signing up and then not following anyone. When you don't follow any other accounts on Twitter the product is not as relevant as it could be. To improve the user experience, we started suggesting some accounts to follow. As a result, new users are much more engaged and active. However, Mark Glaser, a journalist from PBS has asked me for more transparency into how we are creating the list so I'll assume others are interested as well.

How Do We Choose?

We've explained that the Suggested Users list is a bit like your local book store's staff picks but there's a little more to it than that. Our Chief Scientist developed a program that scans active Twitter accounts for a bunch of key ingredients such as how much of the profile is filled out, certain indications that the account is interesting to others in some respects, and a few other signals.

This program then generates a list of potentially interesting Twitter accounts that myself and some product team folks here at Twitter take a look at for another set of criteria. For example, is the account a good introduction to Twittering for a new user? Does the person or organization running the account have a fairly wide or mainstream appeal? If they are a celebrity or business, have we confirmed it's really them?

Finally, we'll do a gut check internally with a couple folks before adding them to the Suggested Users list. The list continues to grow and change although only a subset of twenty accounts are randomly displayed as suggestions during the new user signup process. Twitter is not paid to include accounts in this list. The Suggested Users feature exists to do a job—it makes Twitter more relevant and valuable to users. All that being said, when we find out Oprah starts Twittering for real we may very well put her on the list.

Put Me on The List!

The program that we run looks for a few different things but it definitely helps to fill out your profile info in account settings because otherwise it may skip right over the account. Suggested Users are getting more followers because they are suggested but that doesn't mean everyone else is getting fewer followers. In fact, the feature is working to create more active users who are in turn discovering and following more accounts which raises the potential for everyone.

So, that's how we're doing the list today. We may very well change the way we populate this list or stop using it altogether if there is some other way to get the job done.

Last year we created an interesting site for the US Presidential election. It looked a lot like Twitter but it was focused around the candidates, the debates, and the political topics being discussed. Lots of really great API projects have created similar experiences from the hilarious Cursebird to the sporty Twackle. Twitter is contacted regularly by brands interested in sponsoring innovative experiences based on topics of interest.

However, our focused commitment to Twitter itself means we don't have much time or resources to build these interesting topical experiences. It turns out the folks over at Federated Media have both the resources and the expertise. So if you're a major brand and you want to sponsor a topic-focused social media experience with Twitter, we suggest Federated Media—they'll fix you up right. Check out their first project in conjunction with Microsoft, Exectweets.com.

From small companies to big, there's an increasing amount of business use happening with Twitter. Lots of these companies are using Twitter to search for mentions of their brands or products and then finding ways to better serve customers. Salesforce has taken notice and today announced an enterprise product built upon the Twitter platform.

Customer Relationship Management is a whole big thing that companies worldwide use Salesforce for to run smarter businesses. Salesforce CRM for Twitter makes it easy for companies to connect with customers from within the Salesforce Service Cloud—which is also a whole big thing. If you use Salesforce then you know about this stuff.

Twitter is a simple and open communication service made more interesting by the many different uses people invent. Applications, projects, and integrations such as Salesforce CRM add to an ecosystem which continues to grow around Twitter delivering variety, relevance, and most importantly, value to users. This ecosystem helps make Twitter successful.

A whole bunch of Twitter employees enjoyed an NBA game last night in Oakland thanks to @the_real_shaq and @caroline from Twitter Support who went the extra mile to set things up. The folks at Oracle Arena were also really accommodating and let us use a Luxury Suite which was classy. We love Shaq!

Way back in 2007 during the olden days of Twitter we set up plasma screens in the hallways between panels at SXSW Interactive. Tweets from SXSW'ers floated by hypnotizing attendees and introducing them to Twitter. It was tons of fun.

This year, the folks behind Twistori and Twennis have created an amazing, interactive visualization of what's happening at SXSW. Pepsi has sponsored the project and it will be displayed on plasmas all over the venue. It's running now so you can see that more people are "arriving" than "drinking," "registering," or "partying." However, that will soon change.

Some of the features of this app are Stream (timeline), Popular (trends), Swarm (location), Party Watch, and Overheard. Party watch is going to be super useful if I remember correctly about SXSW and Overheard is hilarious. Congrats to Amy and Thomas for creating such a cool Twitter application and for landing a big sponsor like Pepsico.

Twitter now has 30 employees plus two awesome contractors from Pivotal Labs who work with us and share our office. As we grow, it becomes increasingly apparent how relevant and important company culture is to our success. When we began working with Pivotal last year, we knew they'd be a big help but we didn't expect how much they would contribute to a healthy and attractive work culture. It makes sense then that Webster's defines the word pivotal as "of crucial importance in relation to the development or success of something else."

Aren't We A Pair?

The Pivots, as they like to be called, quickly became cultural role models for pair programming—a methodology in practice at Twitter today. Pair programming has helped us achieve more than just higher quality code and better code readability. This methodology is also about more intense and focused work sessions, automatic code reviews, and better tests. Pair programming also develops better personal relationships and improved communication which has meant a lot.

Testing, Refactoring, and Scalability

Twitter has learned to be much more test-driven and the Pivots played a big part in this important step forward. By always implementing diligent test coverage, our defect rate lowers significantly. To site a specific example, the Pivots introduced Selenium testing into Twitter and it's made a huge difference. In addition, these guys are highly effective at refactoring code which increases maintainability. One of the characteristics we most admire about the Pivots is their enthusiasm for fixing old code and adding test coverage.

In addition to the enhancements the Pivots have added to Twitter's working culture they consistently produce high quality work and they're prolific. The Pivots joined Twitter at a time when our service was straining under its on popularity—their contributions toward a more predictable, measurable and scalable direction were significant and appreciated. In short, we love our Pivots and we're proud to call them part of our team.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom visited our office this morning to have a tour and then talk with us a bit about how Twitter and the city could work together better. It was a great discussion and afterward we assured Mayor Newsom that as Twitter grows we'll continue to keep our headquarters here in San Francisco.

As you might imagine we at Twitter are fond of bird imagery. We have flocks of birds illustrated on our office walls, we often use bird photos in presentations, and we even have corvids living on the roof of our building. Check out these beautiful bird photos we spotted over at the Flickr blog.

Today we discovered about 750 Twitter accounts were broken into and had a link to a webcam site posted on the accounts. It appears other sites and services have been affected by a similar attack. We reset the passwords of the compromised accounts and removed the spammy updates. Our safety team is currently investigating the attack.
As a general reminder, keep in mind that strong passwords can help prevent hijacked accounts. Twitter offers a password strength indicator to help you choose a strong password when you sign up. If you want to change your password now you can do that here. Also, avoid sharing your password with folks or services you don't feel you can trust.