• Expressing Great Joy Or Excitement

    Tuesday, February 23, 2010

    In other words: Yahoo! People want to discover and share tweets everywhere ranging from SMS and TV, to apps and the Web. For a global network of 600 million people, Yahoo! represents the Web. Similar to the partnerships we have made with other large internet companies, Yahoo! will receive what has been dubbed "Firehose"—a full feed of public tweets sent to Twitter and our partners every second of every day from all around the world.

    Through this arrangement, people will be able to find relevant tweets in Yahoo! Search as well as other popular products and properties, including the Yahoo! Homepage, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sports, and more. Yahoo! will also be able to build unique Twitter clients into their properties making it easier for folks to tweet wherever they feel comfortable within the Yahoo! network.

    From our perspective, this partnership represents a big opportunity. Tweets may be short, but they have proven over and over again to contain valuable information. As the Twitter information network grows and expands, it becomes more valuable for everyone who participates. Our open approach helps us get closer to providing universal connectivity to a global network of immediate information.
  • Open Engineering

    Hi, I'm the other @evan, and I'm the infrastructure manager at Twitter. I want to tell you about the steps we've taken to make our engineering division more open and transparent.

    First, we've created an open source directory for the entire company. This lists all the public software that the engineering teams have created or contributed to. Much of Twitter's success has been enabled by open-source software, and we want to give back. Everyone is welcome to use this software for their own projects, and if the project is Twitter-related, so much the better.

    We've also begun posting to our new engineering blog, which focuses on day-to-day engineering challenges. Subscribe to it if you're interested in the development of Twitter internals. We'll try to sample the full range of software development issues we face at a fast-moving company like Twitter. We already have posts about how local trends are organized, how we attack capacity problems, and how you can use our translation libraries.

    Finally, we've updated our job descriptions to better reflect our company culture and the skills we're looking for. My team is looking for performance, systems, and Ruby engineers, but the company is hiring across all groups, so check out our full listings.

    To keep up with all these developments in one convenient place, just follow @twittereng on Twitter itself.
  • Measuring Tweets

    Monday, February 22, 2010


    As a member of the Twitter analytics team, part of my job is to measure and understand growth. The graph above tells a story of how we've grown over the past three years in terms of number of tweets created per day. Please note that tweets from accounts identified as spam have been removed so the counts in this chart do not include spam.

    Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that's an average of 600 tweets per second. (Yes, we have TPS reports.)

    Tweet deliveries are a much higher number because once created, tweets must be delivered to multiple followers. Then there's search and so many other ways to measure and understand growth across this information network. Tweets per day is just one number to think about. We'll make time to share more information so please stay tuned.
  • Hello, Haiti

    If you have been following the events in Haiti since the devastating quake last month, then you know of the initial bursts of compassion. International dialogue now shifts from lifesaving relief to long term restoration. Officials are saying this may take ten years at a cost of billions.

    Post-disaster needs assessment is underway and there will be an international donor conference late next month in New York City. In the meantime, there are ways to stay involved in sustained efforts such as the WFP's monthly donation program.

    Kevin Thau and our mobile team have recently arranged free SMS tweets for Digicel Haiti customers. To activate the service, mobile phone users in Haiti can text follow @oxfam to 40404. Accounts are created on the fly and any account can be followed this way.
  • Are You Following The Olympics?

    Thursday, February 18, 2010

    We experience events like the Olympics, the Super Bowl, the Oscars, and the State of the Union address together by watching them on television—it's the next best thing to being there for most of us. I (@ChloeS) collaborate with our media partners, and have enjoyed watching them weave together new ways of experiencing these events that are even more engaging and interactive.

    CNN's recent State of the Union experiment and MTV’s Video Music Awards effort are recent examples. For the Olympics, NBC worked with Stamen Design to produce a Twitter Tracker capturing Olympic highs and lows—the joy, the disappointment, and the humor. Check out the shift in attention on Wednesday night from Shani Davis' speed skating gold run to the halfpipe antics of Shaun White (during his
    "Double McTwist 1260," Stamen tracked over 1,000 tweets per minute about Shaun):




    The NBC Olympics Twitter Tracker showcases reactions with an authenticity and passion that can only come straight from the fans and athletes.

    So many of us want to experience the full richness of an event, television show, or news story. Increasingly, this means participating in it, and then seeing that very participation reflected in the event itself. We’re only just scratching the surface of this opportunity but we're pretty excited about more experiments like this in 2010.
  • Super Data

    Wednesday, February 10, 2010

    My name is @kevinweil and I'm on the analytics team at Twitter. The convergence of sports, brands, and culture around the Super Bowl makes for a particularly fascinating set of tweets to follow. Fans of the @NFL watch the Super Bowl for the football and others enjoy the spectacle for the commercials. We were curious to understand how these groups interacted with Twitter as the game unfolded.

    We categorized each incoming tweet as about the Super Bowl itself, about the brands or the commercials, or neither. Dividing each group by the total volume of tweets, we produced the graph below which represents a minute-by-minute reflection of people's thoughts and emotions during the game.

    The horizontal axis is time. The vertical axis is a percentage: the blue line is the percentage of tweets, relative to the total worldwide tweet volume, that were about the Super Bowl each minute, while the red line is the percentage of tweets that were about brands or commercials. Click the image for a more detailed version.


    You can see excitement spike with the kickoff at marker A. Everyone watching was geared up for the first commercial break at marker B, hoping for funny or memorable ads; as soon as the first commercial break began, viewers were immediately tweeting about it. The first @DoritosUSA ad at marker C caused the largest per-minute volume of commercial-related tweets -- for the minute following the ad, related tweets were 19% of all tweets we saw, eclipsing even the chatter around the Super Bowl itself for a brief period. Back in the game, excited or dismayed tweets following the first @Colts touchdown at marker D formed nearly 40% of all tweets that minute. The second half began with a bang as @TheSaints recovered a surprise onside kick, and for the next minute 44% of all worldwide tweets were about football. Chatter around brands had meanwhile dropped to much lower levels until @Google's Parisian Love commercial sparked viewers once more. Excitement around the game grew steadily with large peaks following scores and turnovers up until the final moments. As the game ended, one out of every two tweets on Twitter was about the Super Bowl!

    Every day millions of people interact with Twitter to share and discover what's happening now. Major events like the Super Bowl focus people around a few common topics. There is real value in being able to measure the reach and influence of those topics in real time, and we in the analytics team are looking forward to a lot more where this came from. On to the Winter Olympics...
  • Flying Around With Hovercards

    Wednesday, February 03, 2010


    Because many of you use twitter.com to read and write tweets, we've been spending some time focusing on ways to improve your experience on the site. Today, we're introducing a feature called Hovercards that will be a handy way to interact with the folks behind each tweet.

    On any timeline, as its namesake suggests, Hovercards are cards which appear when you hover over a username or avatar. The cards display additional information about the person and allow you to interact with them while staying within the context of your page.

    One way we've found these cards to be useful is to find out more about retweeted people and follow them right there. You can also see more information with an expanded view of the card.

    Sending direct messages to people you follow will also be possible with Hovercards so you can interact with tweeters without having to move off the page.

    Hovercards will be rolled out in stages so not all of you will be seeing them right away.
  • Offical Twitter Developer Conference, Chirp!

    Wednesday, January 27, 2010

    There are more than fifty thousand registered applications on the Twitter platform. These applications represent the creativity, ingenuity, and talent of a growing number of developers and companies building innovative new ways to interact with the Twitter information network. There are thousands of individuals who work on Twitter—over one hundred of these individuals actually work at 795 Folsom Street in San Francisco but many platform developers work in offices, coffee shops, apartments, and even friend's couches around the world.

    We want to get together with some of you and celebrate the chutzpah that goes into so many of the apps built on the Twitter platform with our first ever official Twitter conference especially for developers called Chirp. The word Tweet is a noun defined as the chirp of a small or young bird. The Twitter ecosystem is still very young so naming this conference Chirp felt right. For all the details and information about the event please visit Chirp, The Official Twitter Developer Conference web site. Carsonified are helping us so it's going to be awesome. See you there!
  • Now Trending: Local Trends

    Tuesday, January 26, 2010


    Twitter trends began as a way to shed light on popular conversations. It's interesting to know that one topic can now spread across the world in real-time, and Trends help us discover which of those topics are paramount on a global scale.

    As Twitter evolves, and more people share what’s happening in their own world, we want to provide another way for people to discover topics that may be relevant to them. Last week we began to slowly roll out a new feature called Local Trends to expose what people are talking about on the state and city level, and today we've fully launched so everyone can use it.

    The big events that come up around the world will always become a global conversation, but what about the big events that only happen in your world that only matter to those around you? Or the slight differences in the way Californians perceive an event, like Obama's election victory, versus those São Paulo, Brazil?

    Local Trends will allow you to learn more about the nuances in our world and discover even more relevant topics that might matter to you. We’ll be improving this feature over time to provide more locations, languages, and data through our API.
  • Hope for Haiti

    Friday, January 22, 2010

    Photo courtesy Agência Brasil.

    Since President René Préval and others issued appeals for humanitarian aid, there has been a massively coordinated global response to begin rebuilding Haiti. In addition to governments and organizations doing their part, technology has played a meaningful role. Donations accepted via SMS, Facebook attracting and educating thousands of concerned individuals, Google providing satellite imagery tools to relief workers, iTunes and Download to Donate converting everyday purchases into emergency funding—software augments humanity in a meaningful way and the arts unite us.

    We're thrilled to have been invited to join a stunning assemblage of industries and individuals who are combining forces to raise proceeds for Haiti and make certain that the life cycle of this particular humanitarian mission extends long after the initial burst of compassion. Hope for Haiti Now: A Global Benefit for Earthquake Relief will be the most widely distributed telethon in history both internationally and across all media platforms. This broadcast marks the first US based telethon to air in China as well. On the evening of Friday, January 22, 2010 global citizens will come together in support of those in need.

    The lineup for this program includes more than one hundred of the biggest names in film, television, and music. Proceeds from the telethon will go to The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, United Nations World Food Programme, Oxfam America, Partners in Health, the Red Cross, UNICEF, and Yele Haiti Foundation. This effort can be a testament to the positive global impact we're capable of achieving when we focus on a common goal. Tune in however you like and contribute if you can. We've curated additional resources and suggestions at Hope140.org.