For those who don’t know, Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service, instant messaging, or a third-party application that like “Twitterific” that was developed to make twittering easier for Mac users!
I just received a newsletter from Twitter that details out the recent developments with them. Here are some details:
New Team Members: Four new full time employees have joined the Twitter team since their last update that happened as back as in November, last year. This makes a total of 16 team members working on bettering up this awesome service that Twitter is. They are now starting to fill up their San Francisco office, finally, says the newsletter.
Twitter Usage & Statistics: Twitter has been gathering interesting statistics over some time now. These statistics can be found here at the Twitter Blog. From the email newsletter:
Some stats are fun– like the number of mentions per US presidential candidate, or the
annotated spikes during the Super Bowl. Other stats are more
relative to usage. For example, people who have 10 followers and
are following about 10 people represent 50% of all Twitter-ers. If
you have more than 80 followers and you’re following more than 70
people, then you are in the Twitter minority at about 10%.
Well, I wasn’t aware that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who are running for the US presidential elections had twitter accounts till I read this in the newsletter. You can follow them on twitter at:
Hillary Clinton: http://twitter.com/hillaryclin
Barack Obama: http://twitter.com/barackobama
Partnering Up: Did you know that Twitter works with the folks at Ericsson to manage the text and SMS traffic! We’ve partnered with Digital Garage to help us create the official Twitter Japan service. Another interesting part of Twitter stats is that 60% of Twitter web traffic comes from outside the US and 39% of that is from Japan. Twitter has chosen NTT America Enterprise Hosting to keep Twitter running strong because of their global reach and history of reliability.
New Reply Feature: Noticing lots of folks sending @replies to each other, Twitter has added an easy way to reply to another person on Twitter. Just click the little swoosh icon after an update in your timeline. This will automatically insert the correct “@username” text in front of your next update.
ShortCode for India: Now twitter-ers from India can access Twitter via SMS using the new shortcode: 5566511 for the Indian twitter-fan following. Indians can send one text message to this new local number and Twitter will route that message to all their friends and family at no charge. What a useful for update for a SMS-Junkie like me!
Besides all this, more great news is that Twittervision, a popular Twitter API project, is included in a show at the New York Museum of Modern Art titled “Design and the Elastic Mind.” The show explores the relationship between science and design and is open from February 24 to May 12, 2008.
Twitter also developed a distributed queue server to route vast numbers of messages and they named it Starling. Last month, Starling was released as open source. In addition to giving back to the open source community, Starling improves as the open source community makes enhancements and upgrades.
Also,Twitter has won the first Ever ‘Crunchie’ as the first annual awards show sponsored by TechCrunch was held at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco last month and the very first award given out that night was to Twitter for “Best Mobile Startup.”
Now that is some great development going on. I hope to see more impressive features coming in for Twitter and Twitter-ers. For all of those, who aren’t yet on this microblog! You can join Twitter by using this link and follow me there.