The Official Twitter Blog

Keeping you connected to everything from Twitter.

Results from The Twitter Blog for: May 2008

Our Terms

There’s some discussion in our forum right now about content disputes and the specifics of our Terms of Service. It seems there is room in our Terms for folks to debate the difference between an update and an insult. There is some confusion surrounding our official policy with regard to taking action.

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Thu, 05/22/2008 - 15:38

As we wrote yesterday, we’re working to bring more visibility into our road ahead.  Along those lines, Alex Payne wrote a great post about our past, present, and future architecture challenges.

We’d also like to point you to our official Twitter account: @twitter.  Follow us for semi-frequent updates!

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Wed, 05/21/2008 - 22:31

I have this graph up on my screen all the time. It should be flat. This week has been rough.

We’ve gone through our various databases, caches, web servers, daemons, and despite some increased traffic activity across the board, all systems are running nominally. The truth is we’re not sure what’s happening. It seems to be occurring in-between these parts.

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Thanks for Buying Us Lunch!

Wow, we had a surprise delivery of Extreme Pizza for everyone at Twitter HQ at lunchtime today thanks to a friendly group of Twitterers. Thanks for doing that, Shannon Whitley, Michael Doeff, MarhabaLife, LLC, Heike McDoniel, Michael Keliher, Ben Jackson, Micah Apparel, William Knoll, Jennifer Leggio, and Suzanne Ally. You guys are awesome!

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Not True

Control Lights with Twitter

BusinessWeek on Why Twitter Matters

BusinessWeek has an interesting (to us) article on Twitter this week: “The key question today isn’t what’s dumb on Twitter, but instead how a service with bite-size messages topping out at 140 characters can be smart, useful, maybe even necessary.”

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Guiding Concepts

Much of what we do with regard to product, engineering, operations, and the overall notion of our company culture can be guided by three broad concepts.

Simple is significant. Craftsmanship builds character. Constraint inspires creativity.

The phrase “We work and like it” refers to the fact that our work is rewarding. If that is not true, then no amount of perks is going to fix it. In Twitter, we hope to find our right livelihood. Together, our behavior and actions shape a culture. That culture itself has the potential to influence the world too.

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What Happened Today?

It is not entirely to do with the Democrats, Space Aliens, Mysterious Men in Black, or Arugula. In fact, this afternoon’s service interruption does not have a very exciting explanation.

Part of our caching service required an unscheduled restart. That means a slow rebuilding of data. You may notice some of the normal browsing related features (such as pagination) are missing while we repopulate the caching service. This is so we can get it done quicker.

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How @replies work on Twitter (and how they might)

Tags

I see a lot of confusion around how “at replies”—tweets that start with an @ and then a username—work on Twitter. E.g.:

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