Twitstori is the "the first step in an ongoing social experiment based on twitter" and it is very cool. The geniuses behind this project are amy hoy and thomas fuchs. Amazing!

Labels: apps

There's a new e-card you can send inspired by James Buck's timely use of Twitter. Send it to your loved ones.

Digital Garage engineer Yuu Takaki took this short video at the Twitter office when he was here helping us create Twitter Japan. We are each saying, "Welcome" in Japanese. (At least that's what Yuu told us it meant!)

We're live in Japan!

We’ve noticed a significant percent of Twitter usage consistently originating from Japan despite the fact that our service is in English. This highlighted an opportunity for us to make Twitter better so we worked with our partner, Digital Garage to launch a Japanese version of Twitter. Starting today, the increasing number of folks accessing our service from Japan will have a better experience. Special thanks to Jason Goldman, Britt Selvitelle, Yuu Takakaki, Hiroki Eda, and the rest of the team who helped build Twitter Japan.


The partnership agreement we have with Digital Garage also includes some commercial experimentation in the Japanese market through it’s subsidiary, CGM Marketing, Inc. At launch, visitors to Twitter.jp will see media from two clients. One is a new book about Twitter being released in Japan, another is an automotive news service built on Twitter and sponsored by Toyota.

Kelby thinks Twitter is appealing to moms for a number of reasons.

My day consists of not a single stretch to focus on one thing for more than, oh, a millisecond. Then there’s a whine, cry, dog who needs to piss, kid who wants to be fed, blog I need to write, web article that needs editing… Like every mom, this list is endless.

Twitter’s genius lies in the beauty of 140 characters. It lies in the ability to send without even opening a new browser window, without even needing a computer.

I don’t have time for much, but I have time to Tweet. That I can do.

Are you a mom? Check out The Ultimate List of Moms on Twitter.

We're excited to announce two recent hires. John Kalucki is an experienced distributed systems architect well versed in relational messaging as the former co-founder of San Francisco based SQLstream. Steve Jenson is a familiar face for a few of us here at Twitter HQ because he's a former Google software engineer known for his work scaling Blogger and Blogspot—a service which tens of millions of people use on a regular basis.

Join us in welcoming these two superstars to the Twitter team. They are already digging in, getting up to speed, and helping us make Twitter better. Good things to come.

On Friday, we successfully deployed a new memcache project as part of our overall work to create a more scalable service. After the deploy, we needed to move a lot of data with minimum impact on service quality. To do this, we put together some code that moves data only as it is requested.

This process kept a minimum on service disruption but did cause Twitter to have a complex conversation with two sets of caches over the weekend and into today. This resulted in some caching issues—namely, the /home timeline cache wasn't being updated correctly for everyone.

We're aware of this, we realize that it's annoying, and we're meeting today about how to best finish up this project and clean up any remaining bugs. Thanks to everyone who checked in with us on Satisfaction, @replies, and email over the weekend. Overall, completing this memcache project is a big win that will lead to increased stability.

Update: We're working on this project more today and will be checking in again this evening. Also, we keep folks updated as much as possible on our forum over at Get Satisfaction (in case you're only visiting this blog for news).

Update: We've deployed code that gets Twitter talking to one - and only one - pool
of memcache servers. This eliminates a lot of potential confusion and is progress. But we are still noticing related symptoms so we're still investigating and making improvements.

Update: Okay, here's a more satisfying update. We're catching up on things and backfilling the timelines. Once things are caught up, we should be good—and successfully moved to the new memcaching scheme.

U.C. Berkeley student's Twitter messages alerted world to his arrest in Egypt: "When Egyptian police scooped up UC Berkeley graduate journalism student James Karl Buck, who was photographing a noisy demonstration, and dumped him in a jail cell last week, they didn't count on Twitter."

I heard about the answer-service ChaCha a couple weeks ago. The first question I asked it was "Would a veggie burrito make a good lunch?" A couple minutes later, I got a response that said "A veggie burrito would make an excellent lunch. It's fast and cheap and vegetarian to boot." Now that's the kind of reinforcement I need!

Well now ChaCha is available via Twitter. You can read about the integration on their site. But it's pretty simple:

1. Follow the Twitter user ChaCha
2. Send your question as an @ reply (e.g. "@chacha Does it matter if the soil is wet or dry before re-potting a houseplant?")
3. A couple minutes later you'll get your answer ("@goldman Let the pot go dry. With your fist, bang the bottom of the old pot and the plant, root ball and all, will come out intact.")

Good times.

Labels: apps

If you follow someone on Twitter who sometimes gets a bit too prolific, the folks over at Someecards have you covered: "I think we need to take a follow break until your Twittering gets under control." Totally starred it. Those guys are good.

And following on from yesterdays post: we've made another minor change to the web UI. If you log in, you'll find a new tab is available - the "everyone" tab.

The "everyone" tab is basically what we referred to previously as the public timeline. We've moved it down to sit next to your other tabs so that you can keep track of what everyone else on Twitter is saying, making it easier for you to find other interesting people to follow, as well as giving you access to the public timeline without taking you away from your ability to create an update or your sidebar.

You may also have noticed that we briefly had a link to a simple survey where we asked you what you thought about Twitter. We've taken it down now as it's fair to say we were inundated with responses! Thanks to everyone who took part, and we'll try to share the results soon.

Last night, we rolled out a few minor tweaks to the web UI which should hopefully make your experience with that part of Twitter a little better. Here's a list of the things that we changed, and why we changed them.

1. Search is now at the top of the page

People would often miss the search box when it was tucked away at the bottom of the sidebar before, so we've moved it up to the top of the page to make it easier to find. And consequently, easier for you to find people you might want to follow.

2. 'Find & Follow' has been changed

We've changed the layout of the Find & Follow page a little to separate out the two different tasks you can perform here (basically: getting us to invite people vs. sending invites via us). This change will also allow us to easily add even more ways for you to discover other people you know who might be using Twitter, which we hope to do soon.

We've also revised the wording we use to make it more obvious what will happen at each stage of the process, so you know better what will be sent to who.

3. New profile page display

There's also a new version of the page that people will see when they view your profile page when they're not signed in. Since this page is often indexed by Google, we wanted to make sure that new users could quickly see what Twitter was and what it could do, and provide a nice big button for them to join with.

4. Other "fit and finish" details

Finally, there are a few things that we've tidied up around the site - we've added tabs to the settings page to be more consistent, we've moved the sleep setting for your phone over to the devices page rather than having it on a separate page, we've added an email invites box to the bottom of the search results in case you don't find who you're looking for, we've made the link to the page where we offer badges more prominent (look out for new ones soon!), and we've added a link to a survey so that we can find out a little bit more about you (this will only be temporary, so if you want to participate, make sure you do now).

This is the first step in our current effort to clean up a few areas of the site that we know need some work. We have a few more fixes to make in the near future (also for SMS and m.twitter.com) before we get on to the exciting new features we have planned for the rest of the year!

We hope the changes make a difference to you and, as ever, we'd love to hear your feedback.

Twitterholics is a blog covering many of the great new applications and extensions of Twitter. It's amazing how much cool stuff is being built.

Twhirl is a desktop client for Twitter, based on the Adobe AIR platform. It's one of the more popular ways people like to update Twitter and this morning the Washington Post reported that Twhirl has been acquired by online video company, Seesmic. WaPo reports, "Twhirl creator Marco Kaiser will be joining Seesmic. The service will remain free to use."

To check out more cool Twitter applications, visit the Twitter Fan Wiki or check out the our blog label: apps.

Labels: acquisitions, apps

Living in the Bay Area, we have noticed that we reach for our phones to Twitter the second we feel an earthquake. It looks like Anne Jackson has discovered that Twitter can play a helpful role during Tornados too.

even though they were hiding in closets and basements, they could know exactly where the tornado was because of twitter.

Update: Mark has been using the Twitter track feature to follow events like Tornados and collected quite a few updates as they rolled in.

For a while now I’ve been tracking a number of keywords in Twitter to see the flow of conversation around certain topics. It happens that I’ve been tracking CNN and tornado for a while. Little did I know that these two tracks would seem to merge. With last night’s tornado rolling through downtown Atlanta the play by play, via Twitter.