The Official Twitter Blog

Keeping you connected to everything from Twitter.

Results from The Twitter Blog for: August 2009

140: The Twitter Conference LA

Twitter Sesh

Check out this funny video Ben Stiller (@redhourBen) made with Ryan Seacrest (@RyanSeacrest). “Yeah, why don’t you come on Idol because that will help me. You showing up on American Idol. Again.” Read more...

Twitter Wit

There’s a new book out called Twitter Wit featuring “the Funniest Tweets of All Time.” When Nick Douglas asked us about his ambitious plan to curate this collection it sounded good provided the right permissions were in place—and only if it was funny! After reading a draft, we bought copies for everyone at Twitter HQ.

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Location, Location, Location

Twitter platform developers have been doing innovative work with location for some time despite having access to only a rudimentary level of API support. Most of the location-based projects we see are built using the simple, account-level location field folks can fill out as part of their profile. Since anything can be written in this field, it’s interesting but not very dependable.

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Project Retweet: Phase One

Some of Twitter’s best features are emergent—people inventing simple but creative ways to share, discover, and communicate. One such convention is retweeting. When you want to call more attention to a particular tweet, you copy/paste it as your own, reference the original author with an @mention, and finally, indicate that it’s a retweet. The process works although it’s a bit cumbersome and not everyone knows about it.

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The Adventure Continues

In the past 24 hours, we’ve been contending with a variety of attacks that continue to change in nature and intensity. We’re working to restore access to apps built on the Twitter platform that were affected by defensive measures—there was some overcompensation on our part as we tune our system to deal with this scale of attack.

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Update on Today's DoS Attacks

As noted earlier on our Status Blog, Twitter is back in action. The continuing denial of service attack is being mitigated although there is still degraded service for some folks while we recover completely.

Over the last few hours, Twitter has been working closely with other companies and services affected by what appears to be a single, massively coordinated attack. As to the motivation behind this event, we prefer not to speculate.

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Denial of Service Attack

On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack. Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.

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