The Twitter Engineering Blog

Information from Twitter's engineering team about our technology, tools and events.

Results from Engineering forDecember 2012

Right-to-left support for Twitter Mobile

Thanks to the efforts of our translation volunteers, last week we were able to launch right-to-left language support for our mobile website in Arabic and Farsi. Two interesting challenges came up during development for this feature:Read more…

How our photo filters came into focus

The old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” is very apt for Twitter: a single photo can express what otherwise might require many Tweets. Photos help capture whatever we’re up to: kids’ birthday parties, having fun with our friends, the world we see when we travel.

Like so many of you, lots of us here at Twitter really love sharing filtered photos in our tweets. As we got into doing it more often, we began to wonder if we could make that experience better, easier and faster. After all, the now-familiar process for tweeting a filtered photo has required a few steps:Read more…

Class project: “Analyzing Big Data with Twitter”

Twitter partnered with UC Berkeley this past semester to teach Analyzing Big Data with Twitter, a class with Prof. Marti Hearst.Read more…

Blobstore: Twitter’s in-house photo storage system

Millions of people turn to Twitter to share and discover photos. To make it possible to upload a photo and attach it to your Tweet directly from Twitter, we partnered with Photobucket in 2011. As soon as photos became a more native part of the Twitter experience, more and more people began using this feature to share photos. Read more…

Implementing pushState for twitter.com

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As part of our continuing effort to improve the performance of twitter.com, we’ve recently implemented pushState. With this change, users experience a perceivable decrease in latency when navigating between sections of twitter.com; in some cases near zero latency, as we’re now caching responses on the client.Read more…

Twitter and SMS Spoofing

Over the past two days, a few articles have been published about a potential problem concerning the ability to post false updates to another user’s SMS-enabled Twitter account, and it has been misreported that US-based Twitter users are currently vulnerable to this type of attack.Read more…