The Official Twitter Blog

Keeping you connected to everything from Twitter.

Results from The Twitter Blog for: March 2010

Chirp! Chirp! Chirp!

Spring has sprung and we’ve freed up a bunch of tickets for our first ever official Twitter conference, Chirp. The event will take place on April 14th and 15th in San Francisco. On the first day, we’ll gather at The Palace of Fine Arts—an historic building originally constructed for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition. When you buy a two day pass, you get access to both days of the conference plus the party we’re throwing after.

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Tweaking the Twitter homepage

Twitter’s homepage is a work-in-progress. Today, we’re testing a new design that bubbles up more of the information flowing through Twitter. This builds on a series of changes starting last year when we redesigned the homepage to make search and trending topics more visible and easily accessible to everyone. With that version, we brought the power of search.twitter.com to the homepage and let people explore the value of Twitter without an account.

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State of Twitter Spam

If you look “spam” up in the dictionary, you’ll find two definitions. There’s the “canned meat” and then there’s the “unwanted email.” At Twitter, we see spamming as a variety of different behaviors that range from insidious to annoying. Posting harmful links to phishing or malware sites, repeatedly posting duplicate tweets, and aggressively following and un-following accounts to attract attention are just a few examples of spam on Twitter.

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@anywhere

When we designed Twitter, we took a different approach—we didn’t require a relationship model like that of a social network. Keeping things open meant you could browse our site to read tweets from friends, celebrities, companies, media outlets, fictional characters, and more. You could follow any account and be followed by any account. As a result, companies started interacting with customers, celebrities connected with fans, governments became more transparent, and people started discovering and sharing information in a new, participatory manner.

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What’s Happening—and Where?

Every day, millions of tweets are created. These little bursts of information are about anything and everything—they make Twitter a hub for discovering what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world. A recent burst of interest in location sharing applications, games, and services has many Twitter users excited about appending geographic data to some of their tweets.

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Trust And Safety

As Director of Twitter’s Trust and Safety team, a big part of my job is focused on the detection and prevention of spam and abuse. A couple weeks ago, Biz explained how Twitter users were being victimized by phishing scams spread primarily through links in Direct Messages. Basically, people click the link and bad things happen. My team can only detect these scams after malicious links have already been sent out.

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Enabling A Rush of Innovation

Even before Twitter was officially a company, we opened our technology in ways that invited developers to extend the service. Before long, Twitter became a platform and an ecosystem of innovation began to grow. Recently we’ve announced partnerships with Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft.

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