Once a year there is a very special and potentially awkward event: Movember. Here's what it's all about according to Movember.com:

Movember is an annual, month-long celebration of the moustache, highlighting men’s health issues - specifically prostate and testicular cancer. A Mo Bro starts Movember – the month formerly known as November – clean shaven, and grows a moustache all month long, garnering support from friends and family in the form of donations. What’s more, a Mo Bro is a walking billboard for the cause as his new look opens the door for him to talk about cancers affecting men – making the moustache a symbol, much like the pink ribbon is for breast cancer.

Prostate cancer will strike 1 in 6 men in their lifetime. Testicular cancer is the most common cancer for men aged 18-35. This Movember, the money raised in the U.S. will be split between the Prostate Cancer Foundation and the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

The Prostate Cancer Foundation will use the money raised by Movember to fund research to find better treatments and a cure for prostate cancer.
The Lance Armstrong Foundation will use the money raised by Movember to fund:

• the LIVESTRONG Young Adult Alliance program which has the goal of improving survival rates and quality of life for young adults with cancer between the ages of 15 and 40.

• research initiatives to further understand the biology of adolescent and young adult cancers.

At Twitter HQ, a group of us mo-bros have been spending the month making everyone uncomfortable because we believe in the importance of raising awareness around men's health.

If you'd like to join us in support, please check out our Twustache Team!

Avec l'ajout de la version espagnole du site le mois dernier, de nombreuses personnes ont rejoint les conversations sur Twitter. De plus en plus de personnes twittent en dehors des États-Unis et nous sommes à présent en mesure d'accueillir les utilisateurs de près de 30 pays francophones. Il est maintenant possible de changer les paramètres de langue en français grâce à la participation des traducteurs qui ont contribué à transformer Twitter en une plate-forme de communication véritablement mondiale.

Les twitteurs français peuvent d'ors et déjà suivre des personnes et des sociétés qui leur sont familières. Que vous fréquentiez @lepicerie ou @lopera pour vos sorties gastronomiques, que vous lisiez @LeMondeFR en allant au travail ou que vous écoutiez @theteenagers sur le chemin du retour ou encore que vous soyez fan des @CanadiensMTL, il y a une multitude d'informations utiles à découvrir à tout moment.

Pour voir Twitter en français, il suffit de consulter vos paramètres et sélectionner "français" dans le menu déroulant.

Une dernière chose : une partie de l'équipe Twitter sera à Paris les 9 et 10 decembré pour la conférence Le Web, présentée par @loic. Les spécialistes de notre plate-forme, Ryan Sarver (@rsarver) et Marcel Molina (@noradio) y présenteront, entre autres choses, une session développeurs. Si vous êtes dans la région ces jours-là, n'hésitez pas à nous rejoindre!

In August we announced that we were working on a new API that would provide developers with the ability to geotag tweets. Today, the Geotagging API is officially available.

This release is unique in that it's API-only which means you won't see any changes on twitter.com, yet. Instead, Twitter applications like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and others are already supporting this new functionality (go try them out now!) in interesting ways that include geotagging your tweets and displaying the location from where a tweet was posted. The added information provides valuable context when reading your friends tweets and allows you to better focus in on local conversations. Now you can find out what live music is playing right now in your neighborhood or what people visiting Checkpoint Charlie are saying today about the anniversary of the Berlin Wall. These are only the beginning and we are really looking forward to seeing the creative uses emerge from the developer community.

It's important to note geotagging is disabled by default for all users which means you will need to opt-in in order to use it. To activate the new geotagging functionality, go to your Settings page and click "Enable Geotagging".

Twitter was originally conceived as a mobile status update service—an easy way to keep in touch with people in your life by sending and receiving short, frequent answers to one question, "What are you doing?" However, when we implemented the service, we chose to leave something out. To stay simple, Twitter did not require individuals to confirm relationships. Instead, we left things open.

People, organizations, and businesses quickly began leveraging the open nature of the network to share anything they wanted, completely ignoring the original question, seemingly on a quest to both ask and answer a different, more immediate question, "What's happening?" A simple text input field limited to 140 characters of text was all it took for creativity and ingenuity to thrive.

Sure, someone in San Francisco may be answering "What are you doing?" with "Enjoying an excellent cup of coffee," at this very moment. However, a birds-eye view of Twitter reveals that it's not exclusively about these personal musings. Between those cups of coffee, people are witnessing accidents, organizing events, sharing links, breaking news, reporting stuff their dad says, and so much more.

The fundamentally open model of Twitter created a new kind of information network and it has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates. Twitter helps you share and discover what's happening now among all the things, people, and events you care about. "What are you doing?" isn't the right question anymore—starting today, we've shortened it by two characters. Twitter now asks, "What's happening?"

We don't expect this to change how anyone uses Twitter, but maybe it'll make it easier to explain to your dad.

The UK has had an outsized cultural impact on the world. From music to sports to literature... and now – MMS with Twitter.

Today, not only has Orange UK turned on Twitter SMS, but it has added a first-of-its-kind special enhancement. Orange UK users can also send picture messages (MMS) to 86444 in addition to text messages because of a site that Orange UK has created called Snapshot. The best part is that it is incredibly simple to use:

1. Take a photo on your Orange mobile phone
2. Select 'Send via MMS' or 'Send multimedia message'
3. Send it to 86444

Twitter does not charge for this service. It's just like sending and receiving messages with your friends — your carrier's standard messaging rates apply. Give it a try by sending a text message to 86444 with the word "START." This means that with the same shortcode, 86444, UK users can tweet via SMS with Vodafone, O2, and now Orange.

As our platform team works with more and more developers to expand access to information, users are able to tweet and read tweets in expanding ways across the web. Today, LinkedIn launched a smart integration that lets you sync up your account with Twitter to allow for an easy flow of information to take place between your networks.

You’ll be able to set your professional status and display more fresh content on your LinkedIn profile via Twitter. And, showing your stream in places off of Twitter.com will connect you to even more people. Shared interest in tips, news, leaders and perspectives can thrust conversations into virtual brainstorms and even business opportunities.

The peanut butter and the chocolate have come together to make the perfect combination. Enjoy!

We've just activated a feature called retweet on a very small percentage of accounts in order to see how it works in the wild. Retweet is a button that makes forwarding a particularly interesting tweet to all your followers very easy. In turn, we hope interesting, newsworthy, or even just plain funny information will spread quickly through the network making its way efficiently to the people who want or need to know.

You may remember that we shared the mechanics of this feature with developers a while back so they could think about how to work it into Twitter apps. Now we're ready to start trying it on Twitter. The plan is to see how it goes first with this small release. If it needs more work, then we'll know right away. If things look good, we'll proceed with releasing the feature in stages eventually arriving at 100%.

As Twitter grows and the number of tweets each day continues to astound us, we’ve noticed an increasing amount of clutter in the public timeline, especially with trending topics. Trends began as a useful way to find out what’s going on but has grown less interesting due to the noisiness of the conversation.

So, today we're starting to experiment with improvements to trends that will help you find more relevant tweets. Specifically, we're working to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful. The improvement won't be very noticeable at first, but this is a small step toward unearthing more value in search and getting you more relevant results.

A principios de mes invitamos a algunos voluntarios a traducir Twitter en más idiomas. Gracias a estos entusiastas voluntarios hispanoparlantes, Twitter está ahora oficialmente disponible en español. Puedes cambiar el idioma en la Configuración o visitar Twitter.com y cambiar la configuración del idioma en el la opción situada en la esquina inferior derecha.

Algunos usuarios hispanoparlantes como Pepe Aguilar (@PepeAguilar), Manu Ginobili (@manuginobili), José Hernández (@Astro_Jose), Andreu Buenafuente (@buenafuente), Juan Fonseca (@FONSECA) y La Moncloa en España (@desdelamoncloa) habían descubierto el valor de Twitter incluso antes de que lanzáramos esta versión traducida. Esperamos que ofrecer Twitter en español signifique más gente capaz de acceder y disfrutar de este servicio.

¡Bienvenidos!