Instead of simply being a date which will live in gluttony, this Thanksgiving was made special thanks to Tweetsgiving, a project designed to raise $10,000 in 48 hours in order to build a classroom in Tanzania. Guess what, it worked!

WE DID IT!!! We raised over $10,000 in just 48 hours through the power of Twitter

Congratulations to the folks at Epic Change who raised 106% of their goal in such a short amount of time. MG Siegler of VentureBeat has a nice write-up of the accomplishment.

We're hearing lots of reports about on-the-scene reporting using Twitter from India as horrific terrorist attacks continue to unfold. Om Malik has suggested this Twitter Search query to follow the bad news as it continues to break.

We were surprised today by out of control Canadian SMS costs and had to put 21212 into the same one sided SMS mode that folks in the UK, Australia and elsewhere currently use (they can send updates but can't receive). We posted first on our status blog.

Please understand that we did not mean to pull the rug out from under you if you depend on receiving Twitter updates through our Canadian shortcode. We would have preferred to take more time communicating this change but we had to act quickly and responsibly.

It's clear we have work to do on our SMS offerings. Our long term goal is robust SMS interaction with Twitter around the world. Similar to our other reliability efforts, we can achieve this with the right focus but it's not a quick fix. We're focusing now and we'll keep everyone updated as we make progress.

Rael Dornfest is a famously talented engineer, author, and entrepreneur. Before founding Values of n, Rael served as Chief Technology Officer at O'Reilly Media and is known for his pioneering work on RSS as well being the series editor of O'Reilly's celebrated Hacks books. I met him personally a number of years ago and have always thought he was one of the smartest guys I know.

A short while ago it became clear to Rael that while the innovative personal productivity and information management applications his startup had created were useful products with a loyal following, Values of n was not going to meet its huge expectations as a standalone business.

As an early user, Rael has long been fascinated with Twitter and the unique challenges it presents. He started a conversation with us about how we might work together—and we recognized an amazing opportunity.

Today we're thrilled to announce that Twitter has acquired the assets of Values of n, which include an intelligent sticky-note application as well as a personal productivity application that works over email, SMS, and the Web. Rael has already started adding energy and momentum to the team as a full time Twitter engineer.

Values of n will be shutting down existing products. However, the technology behind the scenes will live on and potentially re-emerge as part of Twitter's systems, services, user experience, or open source libraries. Nothing specific in this regard is planned but there is some smart work in there by the newest member of our engineering team.

Welcome to Twitter, Rael!

It's official: Shaq is on Twitter. Today's New York Times sports section has a great article about how quipmaster and pro basketball player Shaquille O'Neill discovered Twitter and rose to the challenge. What does Shaq think of Twitter so far? “It’s a fun thing. It’s a way for fans to connect.” Follow Shaq @the_real_shaq—his tweets are shaqalicious.

Like most people, you probably have nothing at all to complain about. However, if you feel the need to kvetch, why not follow @kvetch and direct message your complaints? Theoretically, you'll fee better. If you don't, then just complain about it. More info at Kvetch.com.

About 30 seconds in they start bantering about Twitter. Had to put it on the blog for posterity.

Congratulations @barackobama, it looks like you'll be the first President of the United States to have an official Twitter account. Also, thanks for taking part in an event that had a dramatic effect on Twitter activity and exposure worldwide. Here are some quick stats from yesterday.

• Updates increased 46% from previous Tuesday
• 7p-9p PST updates up 200% compared to same time last week
• Signups on Tuesday were up 40.3%
• Between 7p-9p PST signups were up 96.5% compared to same time last week
• Messages per second peaked almost 3x compared to first debate

And through it all, not a whale in site! Our technical approach over the last several months has been to find the weakest point of the system, fix it so it's no longer the weakest, move to the next weakest point, and so on. This simple technique has vastly improved performance, reliability, and capacity. We've got a lot of work ahead but yesterday certainly gave us hope.

Dave Troy has done it again. The guy behind Twittervision has built another compelling tool using Twitter. Twitter Vote Report urges folks to document any problems at the polls tomorrow on Twitter. Here's a news article about it.