The Official Twitter Blog

Keeping you connected to everything from Twitter.

Results from The Twitter Blog for: April 2009

Twitter Search for Everyone!

Every public update sent to Twitter from anywhere in the world 24/7 can be instantly indexed and made discoverable via our newly launched real-time search. What was that loud noise outside your apartment? Did you just feel an earthquake? What do people think about your company, your product, or your city? With this newly launched feature, Twitter has become something unexpectedly important—a discovery engine for finding out what is happening right now.

Searching Outside the Box

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Unauthorized Access: An Update on Security

This week, unauthorized access to Twitter was gained by an outside party. Our initial security reviews and investigations indicate that no account information was altered or removed in any way. However, we discovered that 10 individual accounts were viewed during this unauthorized access.

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Malaria No More

The recent race to 1M followers between @cnnbrk and @aplusk was mostly just for kicks. Nevertheless, it wasn’t all fun and games because it made a difference in raising awareness for Malaria No More, a nonprofit organization in New York that aims to end deaths caused by malaria in Africa. Read more...

What's The Deal with OAuth?

OAuth is an open protocol that Twitter is experimenting with along with other companies such as Yahoo, Netflix, and Google. The idea is that folks can use awesome Twitter related applications and services like We Follow or TipJoy without giving away their account credentials. Our implementation of OAuth is in a beta testing mode right now and we are in close contact with the consortium of engineers who continue to define this open protocol.

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Wily Weekend Worms

On a weekend normally reserved for bunnies, a worm took center stage. A computer worm is a self-replicating computer program sometimes introduced by folks with malicious intent to do some harm to a network. Please note that no passwords, phone numbers, or other sensitive information was compromised as part of these attacks.

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Twitter Partners?

We have no official business arrangement with a consulting agency recently created in the UK calling itself “Twitter Partners.” We have spoken with these folks in person and we wish them well as they endeavor to add value to the ecosystem that is growing around Twitter.

However, the name, branding, and suggestion that Twitter has some kind of equity partnership or an agreement of any kind in place is misleading and wrong. We’ll be working with Peter and his team to clear up this confusion.

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What's Happening?

Thanks for Your Patience

Update: We finished early and service is back.

We’ve isolated many different parts of the Twitter system such that they can scale independently. This means a problem with a particular subsystem can be addressed without causing disruption to the service as a whole.

Although we’ve made lots of progress separating these subsystems, not all aspects of Twitter are isolated in this manner. In certain cases, we still need to place the service in maintenance mode to update or improve parts of the overall system.

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Sometimes We Talk

My inbox is flooded this morning with requests for a response to the latest Internet speculation about where Twitter is headed. It should come as no surprise that Twitter engages in discussions with other companies regularly and on a variety of subjects.

Our goal is to build a profitable, independent company and we’re just getting started. We’ve got just over thirty employees now and we’re working out of a loft in San Francisco’s SoMA neighborhood. By the way, we’re hiring talented people if you want to join us.

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The Discovery Engine Is Coming

A few weeks ago we started testing Twitter Search in the web interface for a subset of folks. We had the search box way up near the top of the page and the results on a separate page. It turns out that’s not the awesome way to do it. The best way to experience Twitter Search is when it’s a natural part of your normal Twitter experience.

Real-time results for ‘coffee,’ saved search for ‘stephen colbert,’ and Trends

Old Idea, Awesome Experience

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