The folks over at The Huffington Post have put together a Twitter account updating live from the Democratic National Convention. You can visit their site or follow them on Twitter.

Twitter is not in the inflatable boat business contrary to this week's flavor of spam. Despite the fact that there are apparently lots of "surprisingly attractive" inflatable boats available for financing, these updates and other spammy accounts are unwanted junk affecting good user experience. Inflatable boats will sink as we work to fry all forms of Twitter spam. So, what are we doing?

Suspended Accounts

Today, we launched a new admin tool which allows us to more efficiently deal with spam when we spot it. Our support staff can now more easily review and suspend spam accounts as well as visibly change the content on the profile to read, "This account is currently suspended and is being investigated due to strange activity," so that others may be warned.

Community Powered Alerts

Suspending a spam account only works after it's already caused some damage. We have enhanced our admin tools to more accurately factor your feedback for a more timely diagnosis. When you block a spam account, we take note—when more people start blocking a spam account, we go to red alert. Blocking also puts that account out of sight and out of mind so you don't have to see it anymore.

Dedicated Personnel

It's unfortunate that this has to be done but we're going to hire people whose full time job will be the systematic identification and removal of spam on Twitter. These folks will work together with our support team, and our automatic spam tools. Our first "spam marshal" is starting at Twitter next week.

As always, fighting spam is a sustained activity. There is no magic wand we can wave or switch we can flip to make it all go away. Spammers will keep finding inventive new ways to advance their motives and harm user experience and we'll keep shutting them down and slowing their progress. We just wanted to make sure everyone knows that we are taking spam seriously.

This AP story points out that Mr. Obama is harnessing the real-time power of Twitter to mobilize his followers to vote. I can just picture the tweet come November: "Hoping you'll go make me president—right now!"

Obama's campaign has used the Internet to boost fundraising, building upon Howard Dean's Web strategy in 2004, but the campaign's use of text messaging has the potential to mobilize voters in a new way.

Obama's campaign has encouraged supporters to sign up for e-mails and text messages and sent text messages to voters on the days of key primary contests. The messages also helped encourage supporters to attend local events and tune into Obama television appearances.

On the Web, Obama's Twitter site now has more than 60,000 followers, who receive updates from Obama's town hall meetings and links to his Web site.

Nick Shapiro, an Obama spokesman, declined to release the number of cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses the campaign has amassed. He said the text messaging has been "valuable because not everyone sits in front of a computer or a television."

The article also mentions that "Republican John McCain's campaign, meanwhile, has not highlighted text messages," Instead McCain is going old-school with viral YouTube videos, "McCain's recent 'Celeb' ad, which compared Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, has received about 2 million hits on YouTube."

The Chumby is consumer electronics product that displays ambient infotainment. It's a squishy little deal that connects to wifi and runs widgets you download from chumby.com. Today Chumby Industries announced that they have added a Twitter widget and a Twitter Search widget to their directory. You can try the widgets out on their site. Chumby!

Labels: apps

The Twitter API has grown over the past 2 years and become very important to Twitter as well as developers who build on our services. This has all happened despite the fact that we could only spare one engineer to work on the API about half of his time. Things are changing.

Alex Payne has been leading much of our API development since he started working on Twitter in March, 2007. As part of a larger plan to dedicate more resources to developers, Alex has taken the official role of API Lead. Twitter engineer Matt Sanford will join him in focusing on our developer offerings.

We're thrilled that Alex has taken the lead on our API. And Matt's familiarity with our search API is critical as we continue to integrate the technology we brought to Twitter as part of our recent search acquisition. With Alex and Matt focusing on our developer offerings full time, there's a lot in store.

On Wednesday, we announced that Twitter has suspended outgoing SMS to our UK number. The blue in the chart above illustrates the percent of outgoing SMS we stopped sending. 2% of our user base consumed 4% of our outbound SMS over the UK number at a price which disproportionately impacted overall operational cost. Nevertheless, this 2% is important to us and the UK number remains active for incoming SMS. We send out a large amount of SMS traffic—most of it going to The United States, Canada, and India where we have established sustainable billing rates with mobile operators and we don't pass any expense on to users.

Why Not Charge Users?

We considered passing the cost (as much as 73 euros per month for 35 tweets a day in some markets) of outgoing SMS on to users through a billing mechanism. However, international billing is a significant project and not something we are comfortable focusing on before we have a dependable offering. It's not right to charge for spotty service—and we know there are bugs. People have had trouble setting up SMS, sometimes messages don't make it to their destination, and sometimes there are duplicate messages.

The Show Must Go On

We love SMS. The lowest common denominator aspect of this service is a defining part of Twitter. We want to provide ubiquitous access in a way that is sustainable for both us and our users. We've done it for 96% of our current SMS traffic and we think we can do it for the rest. But it will take time and we will need help. In the meantime, updates to the UK number still work, more numbers are on the way (hopefully we can get Australia a local number before I am fed to a crocodile), and there are several alternatives for receiving updates.

Let's start with the bad news. Beginning today, Twitter is no longer delivering outbound SMS over our UK number. If you have been receiving SMS updates from Twitter via +44 762 480 1423, you'll notice that they've stopped and you may want to explore some of the alternatives we're suggesting.

Note: Updating via our UK number remains fully supported and these changes do not affect users in Canada, India, or the United States.

Before we go into more detail, here's the good news. Twitter will be introducing several new, local SMS numbers in countries throughout Europe, in the coming weeks and months. These new numbers will make Twittering more accessible for all the folks who have been using SMS to send long-distance updates through our UK number.

Why Stop Sending SMS To Some Countries?

Mobile operators in most of the world charge users to send updates. When you send one message to Twitter and we send it to ten followers, you aren't charged ten times—that's because we've been footing the bill. When we launched our free SMS service to the world, we set the clock ticking. As the service grew in popularity, so too would the price.

Our challenge during this window of time was to establish relationships with mobile operators around the world such that our SMS services could become sustainable from a cost perspective. We achieved this goal in Canada, India, and the United States. We can provide full incoming and outgoing SMS service without passing along operator fees in these countries.

We took a risk hoping to bring more nations onboard and more mobile operators around to our way of thinking but we've arrived at a point where the responsible thing to do is slow our costs and take a different approach. If you don't live in Canada, India, or the US, then we recommend receiving your Twitter updates via one of the following methods.

• m.twitter.com works on browser-enabled phones
• m.slandr.net works on browser-enabled phones
• TwitterMail works on email-enabled phones
• Cellity works on java-enabled phones
• TwitterBerry works on BlackBerry brand phones
• Twitterific works on iPhones

Twitter SMS by The Numbers

It pains us to take this measure. However, we need to avoid placing undue burden on our company and our service. Even with a limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter about $1,000 per user, per year to send SMS outside of Canada, India, or the US. It makes more sense for us to establish fair billing arrangements with mobile operators than it does to pass these high fees on to our users.

Twitter will continue to negotiate with mobile operators in Europe, Asia, China, Australia, The Americas, and other regions to forge relationships that benefit all our users. Our goal is to provide full, two-way service with Twitter via SMS to every nation in a way that is sustainable from a cost perspective. Talks with mobile companies around the world continue. In the meantime, more local numbers for updating via SMS are on the way. We'll keep you posted.

The New York Times has been on a Twitter tear lately. They've got a good collection of accounts that make for some nice variety. Some of the accounts are written straight-up by writers, editors, and bloggers at the Times and others deliver just the Section Headlines. Here's the complete collection if you want to add a little NYT to your Twitter timeline.

New York Times Writers using Twitter

@themoment
@CityRoom
@brianstelter
@TheLede
@TheCaucus
@DotEarth

Follow Section Headlines from The New York Times

@NYTimes
@NYTimesMovies
@NYTimesBooks
@NYTimesScience
@NYTimesArts
@NYTimesBusiness
@NYTimesSports
@NYTimesNational
@NYTimesHealth
@NYTimesTravel
@NYTimesFood
@NYTimesWeather
@NYTimesWorld
@NYTimesStyle
@NYTimesPolitics
@NYTimesMetro

We've previously discussed our efforts to defend Twitter against spam. We are making progress—there are bugs while we find our way—but we're making progress too. Recently, we've seen significant impact by introducing limits around how many accounts can be followed on Twitter under certain conditions. These limits are designed to not affect the vast majority of users. However, some people (who are not spammers) have (and will) run into them. We want to shed some light on what we've done and why.

A Work In Progress

First of all, let me note that these limits are still a work in progress. We've had some bugs in them that are still being worked out. And we need to tweak them to adapt to what we learn about our ever-changing system. However, it's clear from our vantage point they've already had a very positive effect in reducing (though not eliminating) the most common type of Twitter abuse: "Follow spam."

What is "Follow Spam?"

Follow spam is the act of following mass numbers of people, not because you're actually interested in their tweets, but simply to gain attention, get views of your profile (and possibly clicks on URLs therein), or (ideally) to get followed back. Many people who are seeking to get attention in this way have even created programs to do the following on their behalf, which enable them to follow thousands of people at the blink of any eye.

As you can imagine, this is a problem. In extreme cases, these automated accounts have followed so many people they've threatened the performance of the entire system. In less-extreme cases, they simply annoy thousands of legitimate users who get an email about this new follower only to find out their interest may not be entirely...sincere. On rare occasions we may see a person who is mass following and actually cares about every tweet—there is an opportunity for us to learn more about this use case and work to provide a better experience.

There Is No Magic Number

So, our challenge is to curb this type of behavior without interfering with non-spammy users—some of whom may just be very enthusiastic followers. What is a reasonable number of people to follow, anyway? Most users may have a hard time finding 500 accounts they are interested in—while others would think a limit of 10,000 is too low.

Also, people approach Twitter in different ways. Some think you should follow everyone who follows you. Personally, I don't because that would render Twitter unusable for me. I "only" follow about 700 accounts—less than 5% of the 16,000 who follow me. (Mr. Obama may have time to keep up with 50,000 people, but I'm a busy guy!)

The point is, there is no right or wrong. And there is no perfect formula. We do our best by taking a multi-dimensional approach. We look at a number of factors—including how many people are following you back—before applying limits. We don't reveal exact limits, because it's somewhat complicated and, more importantly, if you were to tell spammers exactly what the filtering rules are on your email or, say, Google's PageRank, they'd just engineer their way around them much more easily.

Making Progress

Like I said, this is still a work in progress. The good news for most people is that we're taking measures to reduce junk in the system—and it's working. The bad news for some is that it's possible you'll run into a limit and get frustrated. If that happens, please let us know. We want to learn how people want to use Twitter. (Note: We intend to allow you to follow at least as many people as follow you, though there are cases where that might not yet be the case. We will fix that.)

By the way, this is only a small part of our approach to spam in general. We'll be talking more soon about other measures we're taking. Thanks for hanging with us as we figure everything out.

A fun project has emerged out of the Chinese community on Twitter. The idea is to share what you're doing during the opening day of the Olympic Games. To participate, just add #080808 to your tweet and to watch, just visit Twitter Search. If you want to dig a little deeper, you can customize your profile pic by downloading the photoshop kit on this blog.

Our friends over at Wesabe, a great finance app, have added Twitter integration that helps you track where your dollars go:

"...you can now add transactions to your Wesabe cash account through Twitter. This is a great way to keep track of you spending on the go — just text Twitter the details, and it will show up automatically in your accounts. Or, use whatever other Twitter client you like."

Malicious Software or "Malware" is rampant on the web. Some experts have estimated 1 in 10 web pages contain malicious code that could infect a user's PC. While Twitter can't actually host malware, it does allow hyperlinks and is therefore not immune to those who would attempt to point others directly towards malware elsewhere on the web.

We've already removed the Twitter accounts being discussed today in news articles and blogs and we'll continue along these lines. However, the news is a good reminder. Ne'er-do-wells prefer the web for spreading computer viruses and the like. If you happen across a web page—including a Twitter profile page—and you have reservations about what lies on the other end of a hyperlink, think before you click. Especially if the page seems a little sketchy to begin with.

Also: If you think you've found someone linking to malware on Twitter, please let us know.

How Do You Use Twitter? from biz stone on Vimeo.
Several weeks ago we invited folks in New York City and San Francisco to share with us a little about how and why they use Twitter. We talked to lots of interesting people. Alas, we had to edit way down for time so only a few people made it into the final cut. We plan to put this material somewhere on our site for potential new users to get a better idea of how they might use Twitter. In the meantime, check out the video if you're curious. Thanks to everyone who took the time to chat with us. We enjoyed meeting you! Also, special thanks to @julietweets for taking the lead on this project.

Macworld has some reviews up in case your trying to decide which Twitter iPhone app is right for you.

Labels: apps