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 Instantly unsubscribe from this email:
http://twitter.cmail4.com/u/349785/8liir6ir/
