Toluu

Twitter Blog

Twitter is for staying in touch and keeping up with friends no matter where you are or what you’re doing. For some friends you might want instant mobile updates—for others, you can just check the web. Invite your friends to Twitter and decide how connected you want you to be.

Trimming the SailsSeptember 3

I wanted to take a moment to share more than 140 characters about Twitter's continued reliability improvements and how we've made it here.

I've always respected a good sense of pacing. It's easy to be fast and loose, but it takes a certain discipline, foresight, and patience to guide something through the right way. For most of Twitter's early days, pacing could be considered an unattainable luxury. Our effort started with a bang and quickly accelerated to a disconcerting velocity that never let up. We found ourselves reacting to situations instead of crafting solutions and features we wanted to make.

With nearly two years at full speed, thousands of successes (with as many mistakes), and countless lessons learned, we've finally discovered our rhythm as a team. By carefully regrouping all aspects of our work, breaking the problem down into smaller parts, and iterating rapidly, Twitter, Inc. is poised to bring a new kind of communication to every part of the world.

While our focus on building a stable service is well known, we haven't discussed how we've been organizing our work internally. Twitter is a small company of only 24 full time em

Turning Up The Heat On SpamAugust 22

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

Some SMS PerspectiveAugust 16

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

Changes for Some SMS Users—Good and Bad NewsAugust 14

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 prov

The Gray Lady Is All A-TwitterAugust 13

 

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