Twitter Updates, Statistics, and News

rom Biz Stone reply-to twitterfeedback@gmail.com, date Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 11:45 PM subject Twitter Updates, Statistics, and News mailed-by cmail2.com

hide details Feb 26 (4 days ago)

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Hello Twitter-ers, We haven't sent out a monthly email update since November of last year and a lot has happened since then. We've added new features, upgraded performance, and lots of people are discovering Twitter every day. Come on by and see if you recognize any friendly faces! Visit: https://twitter.com/invitations New Hires We're excited to announce four new full-time employees since our last update. Please welcome Lee and Robey to the Engineering team, Ben to the Product team, and Aaron as our trusty office manager. That's 16 full time Twitter employees! We're finally starting to fill up our little building in San Francisco. Interesting Statistics Recently, we've been digging around a bit and discovering some interesting statistics about Twitter usage. 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%. More stats: http://tinyurl.com/3crjdt Speaking of the candidates, we expect a flurry of Twitter updates during tonight's debate between Clinton and Obama -- both of whom have Twitter accounts. Do you follow them? Hillary Clinton: http://twitter.com/hillaryclinton Barack Obama: http://twitter.com/barackobama Twitter Partners We work with some great companies around the world to make Twitter happen. Much of our mobile texting and SMS traffic is handled in cooperation with the talented folks at Ericsson. We've partnered with Digital Garage to help us create the official Twitter Japan service. (That's another interesting stat: 60% of our web traffic is outside the US and 39% of that is from Japan.) And we have chosen NTT America Enterprise Hosting to keep Twitter running strong because of their global reach and history of reliability. New Reply Feature We noticed lots of folks sending @replies to each other so we've 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 If you have friends or family in India, please tell them that they can access Twitter via SMS using our new shortcode: 5566511. Now folks in India can send one text message to our new local number and Twitter will route that message to all their friends and family at no charge. Twitter at the MoMA 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. Starling Goes Open Source Twitter developed a distributed queue server to route vast numbers of messages and we 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. Twitter Wins first Ever 'Crunchie' 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." Here's a picture of Lee, Jack, Crystal, and Me (Biz) right after the ceremony: http://tinyurl.com/yv5wfv That should catch us up for now. Happy Twittering! - Biz Stone and the Twitter Team http://twitter.com/biz