At some point, Twitter-ers came up with their own method of directing updates to one another using an @ symbol. We started supporting this behavior by doing things like creating the in reply to link, confining the reply messages to friends in the loop, and linking the @username to a profile. Another layer of support to this behavior is a feature we launched tonight which collects updates directed at you—just in case you missed ‘em.

Twitter was invited to be one of the early participants and the new Facebook application platform. Basically, Facebook now allows developers to build applications folks can install and use inside Facebook. It’s pretty awesome. So, if you’re on Facebook, be sure to install our Twitter application!

Twitter has been nominated by Lovemarks!

As much as we’d love to blame yesterday’s outage on scaling issues, hardware, exponential growth, rogue bots, aberrant behavior, or even our brief stint on Japanese television last night, we can’t. Having achieved a strong position with regard to scaling Twitter, we felt comfortable enough to begin optimizing lots of smaller parts of our application for maximum efficiency. We were so focused on those smaller details that we lost track of the bigger picture and the site was unresponsive for lots of folks throughout the day.