Our year in Twitter news and notes

As the year ends, we wanted to look through our various communication channels to learn what news and notes have interested you most in the past 12 months.

First up, @twitter. Here are the top 5 tweets of the year (those with the most clicks and retweets):

1) New Twitter Profiles

2) Tweets must still flow

3) Twitter Mobile app updates for iPhone and Android

4) New version of Twitter, now on for everyone

5) Twitter now in RTL languages: Hebrew, Farsi, Arabic, Urdu

Perhaps not surprisingly, your attention has been on a variety of features you want on your Twitter — and our intention to keep your Tweets flowing freely is clearly something you feel passionate about too.

Beyond any specific Tweet, we’re gratified to see that @twitter followers more than doubled this year. (Last January, we had 6.86 million followers; today, at the end of December, you are 15.4 million strong.) Thank you for following along as we continue to develop and strengthen Twitter for you.

Twitter Blog
You’ll see some variations here from our top Tweets, and the top 5 posts (by pageview) were all published in December.

1. Twitter photos: Put a filter on it
2. Your Twitter archive
3. New profiles for everyone
4. Welcome, Pope Benedict XVI
5. This Year on Twitter

Interesting sidenote: Since the blog started in August 2006, eight of the most popular posts ever appeared in 2012, including these five. As for frequency, we’ve been ramping up: including this post, we’ve published 204 times in 2012. That’s the most ever over a year’s time.

On our other core blogs, you responded to a wide range of news. The Ads Blog revealed most interest in our advertising partnerships (American Express in March, Pepsi in May). Twitter developers read up avidly on changes to our API, and the ever-popular Bootstrap, including version 2.0. On our Engineering Blog, technical readers were very keen on our quest for speed and the new Innovator’s Patent Agreement.

During a 7.3 earthquake that reverberated off the coast of Japan in early December, readers there turned to our info on how to use Twitter in such an emergency, which also described Twitter’s inclusion in the government’s Lifeline program. (News of the Twitter photo filters was the other most-read post in Japanese.) In France, the photo filters release was most popular, as was the ability to see Trends in more cities. The UK had a huge year in sport, and our posts on the first 24 hours of the Summer Olympics and the dramatic Champions League match garnered the most views. Meanwhile, Portuguese Twitter users (who are mostly in Brazil) were especially keen on the new Discover features released in May.

As always, we’re pleased to bring you news and information about Twitter that you find useful and interesting. Here’s to the year ahead on our global town square.

Posted by Karen Wickre (@kvox)
Editorial Director