The Official Twitter Blog

Keeping you connected to everything from Twitter.

Results from The Twitter Blog for: January 2009

Tweet, Meet, and Give

Twestival: “On 12 February 2009 100+ cities around the world will be hosting Twestivals which bring together Twitter communities for an evening of fun and to raise money and awareness for charity: water.”

Read more...

Inauguration Day on Twitter

It was a big day at Twitter HQ today and it’s not even noon yet. We saw 5x normal tweets-per-second and about 4x tweets-per-minute as this chart illustrates. Overall, Twitter sailed smoothly through the inauguration but at the peak, some folks did experience a 2-5 minute delay receiving updates. We’ll be analyzing this later today so that during the next massively shared global event there is no appreciable delay. Exciting!

Read more...

Current Twitters the Inauguration

Similar to the debates, Current will be broadcasting tweets over a live feed of the inauguration on television as well as online. Check it out.

Read more...

The Zen of Twitter Support

The Twitter support team is lead by Crystal along with two other full-time employees including one dedicated solely to spam. We also have an additional part-time employee helping out. As you might imagine, this little team handles a lot of requests and does an amazing job with precious few resources. To further improve efficiency we’ve just migrated to new support software called Zendesk.

Read more...

Building on Open Source

Kestral photo by mugley

When we plan new engineering projects at Twitter, we measure our requirements against the capabilities of open source offerings, and prefer to use open source whenever it makes sense. By this approach, much of Twitter is now built on open source software.

Read more...

It's Business Time!

Twitter receives a crushing amount of partnership opportunities on a regular basis—it’s a good problem to have yet until now there has been nobody on staff dedicated solely to business development. Things are changing. We hired Kevin Thau as our Director of Mobile Business Development late last month. Although his title includes the word “mobile” Kevin is digging in on several fronts since he’s our first official business development guru.

Read more...

We Got The Crunchies

Don't Blame the Geeks!

Monday Morning Madness

This morning we discovered 33 Twitter accounts had been “hacked” including prominent Twitter-ers like Rick Sanchez and Barack Obama (who has not been Twittering since becoming the president elect due to transition issues). We immediately locked down the accounts and investigated the issue. Rick, Barack, and others are now back in control of their accounts.

What Happened?

Read more...

Gone Phishing

If you receive a direct message or a direct message email notification that redirects to what looks like Twitter.com—don’t sign in. Look closely at the URL because it could be a scam.

What Is Phishing?

Read more...