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Twitter Blog

Where Are My Followers?Today

Update: This has been fixed but the actual numbers and profile pictures might not look right until tomorrow afternoon due to caching.

Recently, some people began noticing a decline in their following and follower numbers. We investigated and determined this was caused by an error during a database upgrade. We'll be restoring followers throughout the day to those who were affected and keeping the status blog and Get Satisfaction forum updated with specifics.

Please note that this is unrelated to our ongoing spam initiative as some folks were wondering. Twitter fights spam by putting rules in place to inhibit certain activities. We don't automatically delete accounts en masse.

Follower Stats by TwitterCounterYesterday

Here's a fun new application from Dutch entrepreneur Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten and friends that will appeal to anyone who likes simple stats. TwitterCounter is a free service for folks who want to track and share the number of followers they have on Twitter.

An Ongoing BattleJuly 21

Because following another account on Twitter is something you must do with intent, we don't see the same kind of spam normally associated with email—namely, lots of unsolicited Twitter updates in your timeline. However, Twitter has grown popular and thus attracted those who would try to manipulate various features to redirect traffic or gain some other advantage.

We are actively engaged in working to defeat the variety of spam that has made its way to Twitter. The main motivation for spammy behavior on Twitter seems to be the usual: driving web traffic to another site. Some account owners will serially create many accounts and then post thousands of links. Others have only one account but still go crazy posting links—usually to the same web site and often in a way that attempts to trick people into clicking.

A Different Scale

Posting links to Twitter is great and we encourage people to do so. However, spammers are posting links on a whole different scale and they're doing something else we call Aggressive Following. This behavior entails following thousands of other accounts in the hope of reciprocation and it really peeves Twitter users because

Finding A Perfect MatchJuly 14

Last month, Twitter had a very special date in New York City. We met with another startup, had lunch at the famous Shake Shack, and spent some quality time together in Union Square. The meeting with this other startup was largely a formality—we had already fallen in love with both the technology and the team.

Keeping up with interesting news and people you care about is one dimension of Twitter, but what if you need to find out what’s happening in the world beyond your personal timeline? How do you find out about updates from Mars? What do people think of the new Will Smith movie? Providing tools for filtering all the real-time information coursing through Twitter has long been part of our vision.

We introduced a feature called Track close to a year ago because we recognized filtering as a key component of the Twitter experience. The folks over at Summize discovered Twitter and significantly improved on this idea of filtering and search. Twitter and Summize met last month to discuss a more formal relationship.

Let Our Congress TweetJuly 10

From letourcongresstweet.org: "Congress should join us where we the people are talking, sharing and networking – online. As Congress reconsiders the restrictions placed on their Internet use, you can tell Congress to embrace the communication technologies that we already use."