Every week we capture and share the incredible moments that could happen #OnlyOnTwitter. This week was all about new people joining: country music legend Merle Haggard sent his first Tweet, Mitt Romney’s wife Ann joined to refute a detractor, and everyone’s favorite Golden Girl Betty White joined and then pranked a co-star. But that’s not all! Twitter saved a kidnapped man, transported us to Grateful Dead concerts in 1972 and gave us hints of how to find Easter eggs from Ryan Gosling*! So many great moments on Twitter this week.

* — We promise we won’t do another Ryan Gosling story next week. Maybe. If you see another good one, share it using the hashtag #OnlyOnTwitter!

Betty White joins Twitter...maybe
Betty White said she'd never join Twitter and "Hot in Cleveland" co-star Valerie Bertinelli believed her...a little too much.

Hello Twitter!And they said it would never happen.Oh wait, that was me.

— Betty White (@BettyMWhite) April 10, 2012

I think @BettyMWhite pranked me but good! #blushing

— Valerie Bertinelli (@Wolfiesmom) April 11, 2012

Twitter saves kidnapped South African man from his trunk
When robbers carjacked a man and put him in his trunk in Johannesburg, they forgot to check for his mobile phone. He used it to text his girlfriend about his predicament. She immediately asked Twitter to help track him down. (h/t Ars Technica)

Be on the look for DSS041GP my boyufriend has just been hijacked and is in the boot please RT

— Lynn Peters (@onebadvillynn) April 7, 2012

Ann Romney joins Twitter
After CNN Commentator Hilary Rosen criticized Ann Romney on Twitter, the presidential candidate's wife joined Twitter to rebut her.

I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work.

— Ann Romney (@AnnDRomney) April 12, 2012

Bubba Watson wins the Masters
In the final round of the 2012 Masters, Bubba Watson found himself in a playoff with Louis Oosthuizen. With an incredible shot from deep in the woods, Watson earned the fabled green jacket and took to Twitter to share his inspiration.

1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

— bubba watson (@bubbawatson) April 8, 2012

After winning the Masters, Watson's followers grew by more than a third in just one day.

Welcome to another edition of our on-going effort to capture and showcase the incredible array of moments that happen #OnlyOnTwitter. This week we bring you a conversation with Madonna, a Q&A with the Vice President, and a chance encounter with Ryan Gosling.

Madonna chats with her fans
To celebrate the first week’s success of her new album, pop icon Madonna chatted with fans via Twitter, including quite a few famous ones.
A British journalist was saved from a NYC taxi by movie star/Internet heartthrob Ryan Gosling. She shared the news via Twitter, of course, and found herself unwittingly at the center of a new viral sensation.

#OpeningDay for Major League Baseball
Team accounts and @MLB and many teams rung in a new season on Twitter, rallying fans with Tweets and photos.

Tornadoes strike Dallas
Violent tornadoes raged through the Dallas metro area and the Weather Channel, NBC News and the Washington Post collected Tweets into Storifys. This is one of the remarkable Tweets they highlighted.

#AskVP: College Affordability
Vice President Joe Biden took questions on Twitter about the costs of college in America.

Tim Gunn joins Twitter
Project Runway host and self-described “Fashion Therapist” Tim Gunn joined Twitter and was warmly welcomed.

With the remaining teams taking the field today, the Major League Baseball season is officially underway. This season, Twitter can be your all-access pass to everything happening during games, off the field, and at the front office.

We’ve put together a lineup of great baseball-related accounts. Whether you’re part of The Brew Crew or you bleed Dodger blue, you’ll find your team on Twitter; every major league team is now tweeting. You’ll also find the accounts of players, general managers, sportswriters, and fellow fans. Check out some of the All Stars who have recently joined:

San Francisco Giants ace pitcher Tim Lincecum readies himself to take the mound to open their season today:

Thanks everybody for the support, doing my best to keep up, ready to kick off the 2012 season...THANKS again, you guys are rad!

— Tim Lincecum (@timlincecum) March 3, 2012

Even though he’s starting the season on the DL, Philadelphia Phillies first baseman Ryan Howard can’t wait to cheer on his team:

Good morning twitter world. Excited for tomorrow. Excited for my teammates. Opening day. The journey starts now.

— Ryan Howard (@ryanhoward) April 4, 2012

You now have the chance to connect with players like never before. Imagine if tweeting could get you a trip to hang out with your favorite player at a spring training game — that’s exactly what Cincinnati Reds second baseman Brandon Phillips did for two lucky fans. Or you could help Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Matt Kemp with a vital part of his in-game strategy.

Twitter can also offer you a glimpse into team life off the field. Jason Motte, relief pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, lets us know what the players really talk about off the field:

Clubhouse question of the day: Is hunger games based on a true story?#really

— Jason Motte (@JMotte30) April 3, 2012

Even though baseball is often called “the national pastime”, it does have a wide international audience, and Twitter helps connect fans all over the world to the game. For example, New York Yankees second baseman Robinson Cano, originally from the Dominican Republic, is one of several players who hosts Twitter Q&As with fans in both English and Spanish:

Gracias a todos por su apoyo... Ahora a trabajar #SpringTraining

— Robinson Cano (@RobinsonCano) March 3, 2012

You’ll also find several General Managers from each league on Twitter, giving you insights into how their team is shaping up and what happens in the front office throughout the season. Sandy Alderson from the New York Mets let fans know which prospects might soon have a future in the big leagues, while Jeff Luhnow, General Manager of the Houston Astros, shared a scouting report in photo form:

One of today's Astros pitchers. twitter.com/jluhnow/status…

— Jeff Luhnow (@jluhnow) March 24, 2012

Twitter has also become an instrumental tool in the press box, where baseball reporters post about everything from trade rumors to last-minute roster moves to real-time in-game analysis. Elsewhere in the stadium, Twitter is even making its way onto the Jumbotron: if you head to Target Field for a Minnesota Twins game, check out the “Tweet Board”, which displays Tweets from fans during the game.

To make sure you don’t miss any of these moments, check out our MLB Twitter list, and follow @TwitterSports. Be one of the first to enjoy Twitter as it takes you out to the ballgame.

Twitter continues to grow at a record pace -- we now have 140 million active users and more than 340 million Tweets each day. As our reach expands, we become a more attractive target for spammers. While spam is a small fraction of the incredible content you can find on Twitter, we know just how distracting it can be.

We have previously discussed the ways we deal with spam on Twitter. Our engineers continue to combat spammers’ efforts to circumvent our safeguards, and today we’re adding another weapon to our arsenal: the law.

One challenge in battling spam is bad actors who build tools designed to distribute spam on Twitter (and the web) by making it easier for other spammers to engage in this annoying and potentially malicious activity.

This morning, we filed suit in federal court in San Francisco against five of the most aggressive tool providers and spammers. With this suit, we’re going straight to the source. By shutting down tool providers, we will prevent other spammers from having these services at their disposal. Further, we hope the suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter.

While this is an important step, our efforts to combat spam don’t stop here. Our engineering team continues to implement robust technical solutions that help us proactively reduce spam. For example, earlier this week, our engineers launched new anti-spam measures within Twitter to more aggressively suspend a new type of @ mention spam. Additionally, we now use our link shortener (t.co) to analyze whether a tweeted link leads to malware or malicious content. This helps us prevent users from visiting malicious links and helps us shut down hundreds of thousands of abusive accounts. You can help out, too, by reporting and blocking spammers you encounter on Twitter.

We are committed to fighting spam on all fronts, by continuing to grow our anti-spam team and using every tool at our disposal to shut down spammers. Today marks an important step forward.

It’s been a March of “Madness” on Twitter as NCAA fans shared brackets, cheered for their teams and taunted the competition. We’ve been watching closely to pull together a picture of the Twitter conversation around the NCAA post-season.

In the end, it came down to Kansas versus Kentucky at the New Orleans Superdome. Despite a Kansas rally in the last four minutes, Kentucky commanded the game from the start. The big story on Twitter was freshman Anthony Davis’ ability to dominate the game while scoring just six points:

Anthony Davis hasn't made a field goal and he has had an immense impact on this game.

— Andy Katz (@ESPNAndyKatz) April 3, 2012

Just as at the Superdome, Kentucky controlled the conversation on Twitter, sustaining a higher Tweets-per-minute (TPM) rate than Kansas throughout the game. The conversation peaked at the end, when Tweets about the Championship exceeded 30,000 TPM.


Before the final game, the tournament buzz peaked on March 25th, when Kansas and the University of Kentucky advanced to the Final Four and helped inspire more than a million Tweets in the process:


Last month, the conversation started, as it always does, with the brackets. And what better place to share your completed bracket than Twitter? Across sports, stars shared their brackets with an account called @TheLockerRoom

Speaking of the Devil..check out @kevinlove Should be some good competition #BRACKETOLOGY twitter.com/TheLockerRoom/…

— The Locker Room (@TheLockerRoom) March 13, 2012

Of course, March Madness went viral far beyond the sports arena: members of Congress got in on the predictions as well.

Here's my #MarchMadness bracket - yep, like many I made my picks before the Fab Melo/Syracuse news! countryfirstpac.com/about/picks.as…

— John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) March 15, 2012

As the tournament progressed, the turning point for one favored team came when UNC’s Kendall Murphy broke his wrist. Fans across the country showed their support by marking their own wrists with the number 5.

Fans already showing their supports for @KButter5#PassFir5t twitter.com/PassFir5t/stat…

— Pass Fir5t (@PassFir5t) March 20, 2012

From the first upset to the final free throw, some of the best moments of March Madness happened on Twitter. Follow @TwitterSports and your favorite athletes, coaches, teams and reporters to find out what’s happening in any sport.

A new version of Twitter for BlackBerry introduces new features that make it easier to connect to the people and things you care about.

Twitter for BlackBerry makes it easier to share links to web pages directly from the browser. When you tweet a link it will automatically be shortened so it takes up fewer characters. And, you can upload photos to Twitter (pic.twitter.com) right from your device’s camera or when writing your Tweets.

Now you can connect your Twitter account with BlackBerry Messenger. This makes it possible to share your latest Tweet as your BBM Personal Message. You can also access your contacts' Twitter accounts right from their BBM profiles.

You can download this version of Twitter for BlackBerry now from BlackBerry App World.

Last week we kicked off a new blog series showcasing the amazing array of moments that occur #OnlyOnTwitter. We’re back again with highlights from this past week, which take Twitter to the deepest part of the ocean and a racecar driver’s seat in the sky.

James Cameron tweets from the seafloor
The director of Titanic took a very special trip—his was the second-ever dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean. And that’s how he became the first person to send a Tweet from 35,755 feet below sea level.

You know those incredible moments that make Twitter so special — the ones you can’t help but tell somebody about? Over the last six years, Twitter has hosted many thousands of these, big and small: news events, conversations between celebrities, great creative hashtags, running jokes or debates.

We’ve started collecting these moments here over the last few months, and now we’re sharing them with you. Each week you’ll see instances from sports, television, news, music — and they all have one thing in common: they appear #OnlyOnTwitter.

Without further ado, our picks for the week:

The artists’ view of #SXSW Music
Bands and performers told their own stories at this year’s SXSW, tweeting their performances and those they enjoyed as fans. See Austin from the musicians’ perspective with Tweets from Kreayshwan, Richard Swift, Kimbra and more:

SXSW in 10 words : music, beards, beer, plaid, sweat, wristbands, perfectly, scuffed, boots, life.

— Ingrid Michaelson (@ingridmusic) March 15, 2012

#MarchMadness: Kendall Marshall’s broken wrist
After the UNC point guard fractured his wrist, his fans tweeted their support with photos of their own wrists emblazoned with his number: 5.

Successful morning, Im screwed.

— Kendall Marshall (@KButter5) March 19, 2012

Arsenal Twitter takeover
UK football club Arsenal F.C. invited some of its players to take over the team’s main account for a Q&A with fans.

Mikel said: "Just look after yourself, and a strong gel!" #ArsenalLive

— Arsenal.com (@Arsenal) March 14, 2012

An @-reply becomes a collaboration with Deadmau5
When electronic music producer/vocalist Chris James saw Deadmau5 was working on a new project, he tweeted to him with some possible vocals.

@deadmau5 did some unique shoegaze-ish vocals over "The Veldt" based on the story. Hope you enjoy soundcloud.com/chrisjamesoffi…

— Chris James (@ChrisJOffical) March 18, 2012

Walking Dead fan Q&A
As the second season of AMC’s popular zombie series drew to a close, executive producer Glen Mazzara fielded questions from fans.

“@IAMQUIGLEY: if you could have a team of three people to fight zombies with you who would they be?” Abed(#Community), #Terminator, Michonne

— Glen Mazzara (@glenmazzara) March 21, 2012

Draymond Green and his famous fans
MSU senior Draymond Green is having a great #MarchMadness so far, and he’s not too busy to tweet with other sports stars.

@MagicJohnson thanks big dog appreciate it!!!! #spartan4Life

— Draymond Green (@Money23Green) March 19, 2012

Cross-posted on the TweetDeck blog.

Today, we’re releasing a new version of TweetDeck. This update introduces some great new features as well as a host of smaller improvements and bug fixes. Check out this video for a quick tour of the updates, and read on for more information.



List Management

You can now create, edit and delete lists directly in the app. There is even a dedicated Lists button on the toolbar, so you can quickly and easily dive in to manage your lists. Additionally, all user profiles have an “Add or Remove from lists” menu item, making it easy to manage list memberships for any Twitter user.

Activity & Interactions

We’ve added two columns to TweetDeck to make it possible to see additional activity on Twitter, including retweets, favorites and follows.

A new Interactions column, available under the Add Column button, is like an enhanced Mentions column. It shows not only all of your mentions, but also alerts when you have been followed, added to a list, retweeted or favorited.

Perhaps even more interesting is another new column type called Activity. This column shows a real-time feed of all the follow, favorite and add-to-list actions performed by the accounts that you follow. We think you’ll find this helps you discover lots of interesting accounts and content that you may not have previously seen.


Media Previews

TweetDeck now has inline media previews, so you can view images and videos faster and more easily. You will now see a small preview of images and videos under the related Tweet. If you’d rather not see in-line media, just turn this option off under Settings > General.

Additionally, you can view a large preview of images and videos in an in-app media gallery. Just click the preview image, or the URL in the Tweet, and the media will be displayed in a large gallery view.



Edit & RT

We listened to the feedback that the “Quote” retweet option was not as useful as the previously available “RT @username:” format. So, in this version, we’ve replaced “Quote” with “Edit & RT,” which lets you edit the Tweet before sending.

Six years may not be very long in human terms, but it’s been quite an enormous span for the thing we know and love as Twitter. When @jack first sketched out his notion in March 2006, no one could have predicted the trajectory of this new communication tool. Now it seems that there are as many ways to express yourself in 140 characters as there are people doing it. And at last check, there are more than 140 million active users (there’s that number again) — and today we see 340 million Tweets a day. That’s more than 1 billion every 3 days. However concisely, it turns out there’s plenty to say.

Without you, of course, there wouldn’t be a Twitter. We mark our sixth birthday with you in mind, and celebrate your myriad ways of engaging, enjoying, and emoting on our platform. As Jack noted when he posted his sketch of the service he envisioned, “I'm happy this idea has taken root; I hope it thrives.” Thanks to you, it is.