Twitter adds 30 million users; Growing as fast as Facebook

Twitter seems to have exploded in the last few months, making an impressive amount of headway in the social network realm in the past year. Twitter has added over 30 million users in the past two months, according to TechCrunch.

Since the launch of the new Twitter home page two months ago, the site has acquired over 30 million users. The new design could explain the massive increase in users over the last two months, as the sites re-design is much easier to use and navigate, not to mention it actually looks nice.

What's more surprising is Twitter is actually growing as fast as Facebook, the number one social network in the world. Both Facebook and Twitter are growing by 15 million members per month, as more and more users are joining on the social network bandwagon.

Twitter is now 175 million members strong, but Facebook is still far ahead of pack with 500 million users announced back in July, and an estimated 545 million users as of today.

71% of all tweets are ignored

Over a two month period of time Twitter users were able to tweet 1.2 billion times which gave Sysomos, a provider of social media monitoring and analytics technology, more than enough data to analyze just how much your followers care about what you have to say. They found that over the two month period, only 6% (72 million) of all tweets were retweeted and only 23% (276 million) got at least one reply while the remaining 71% (852 million) got not reaction at all.

While they were analyzing the data, they found that of the 276 million tweets to get a reply, 85% of them were only able to get one reply from their tweet. They also found that 92% of all retweets happen within the first hour. If it has not been retweeted by the first hour, most likely it won't be retweeted at all. This goes for replies as well. If someone plans to reply to your tweet, it will most likely happen within the first hour as they have found to be the case 96% of the time.

Recently, we found out that Twitter uses 12 terabytes of storage a day to hold all of the tweets generated by their users. So, with 71% of the tweets being almost entirely ignored, it seems like they may be wasting space saving tweets forever.

New Twitter security hole can expose direct messages

Twitter may be suffering from yet another embarrassing software security vulnerability, according to SearchEngineWatch.com. Apparently, if you use you Twitter credentials to log in to a third-party website, that site could gain access to your private direct messages. Gary-Adam Shannon, in a technical demonstration using WordPress and the Twitter API, shows how a small code change in the API code can send direct messages of logged in users directly to your email inbox of choice. Twitter has yet to comment on the vulnerability. For now, Shannon recommends not letting Twitter log you in to applications.

This vulnerability is the latest in a steady stream of embarrassing and crippling bugs in Twitter’s platform that seem to be popping up more and more often recently. As more visible vulnerabilities surface, more security pros will likely hop on the bandwagon to try and further exploit Twitter. This isn’t a bad thing, as the new attention being thrust on the software engineers at Twitter will (hopefully) make the service safer and more reliable in the future.

In early May this year, Twitter users were able to force others to follow them with a simple command inside a tweet. Twitter was quick to act over the flaw. The company issued a status message indicating that the bug was remedied and that protected updates did not become public as a result of the "bug". This latest flaw comes less than a month after the company fixed a fatal scripting vulnerability that brought the web version of Twitter to a halt for several hours on September 21.

If this latest bug is anything like the previous ones, Twitter will likely jump on this and fix it rather quickly. We’ll keep you posted as details emerge.

Twitter gets new CEO for second time in 2 years

Twitter Inc., the Internet service for short messages, is developing a penchant for keeping its CEOs' tenures relatively brief, too.

Evan Williams on Monday became the second Twitter co-founder to step aside after a two-year stint, making way for a colleague considered to be better suited for steering the next phase of the company's rapid growth.

Known simply as (at)Ev on Twitter, Williams intends to focus on product development while continuing to work for the company.

The change in command at the privately held company turns over Twitter's leadership to Dick Costolo, an early investor who was hired as chief operating officer a year ago.

Since Costolo's arrival, Twitter has moved into larger offices in San Francisco to accommodate a payroll that has swelled from a few dozen people to about 300 employees.

Costolo, 47, also has played a key role in devising an advertising for Twitter as it tries to make money from an online audience that ballooned from 3 million registered users when Williams became CEO in 2008 to 160 million now.

A recent redesign of the Twitter website opened up more opportunities to sell ads without disrupting the stream of messages by creating a new pane for photos, video and other information, including marketing messages. Williams oversaw the website's new look.

In a joint interview Monday, Williams and Costolo said they believed Twitter had reached another critical juncture that called for different leadership skills.

"I have always been more of a product guy and we are entering a new phase of the company where we require a CEO who is more into operations, sales, finance and operations," Williams said. "And Dick is better at those things than I am."

Williams, 38, took on the CEO job in 2008 because the company's board felt he could do a better job expanding Twitter at that stage than another co-founder, Jack Dorsey. It was Dorsey, still Twitter's chairman, who came up with the idea of broadcasting messages limited to 140 characters and who posted the first message, or "tweet," on Twitter in March 2006.

Costolo's promotion will likely spur speculation about a possible initial public offering of stock from Twitter.

But Costolo, whose Twitter handle is (at)dickc, said in Monday's interview that an "IPO really is not anything we talk about. We have no timetable for it."

Twitter's new leader is much more boisterous than his soft-spoken predecessor. Even so, the two share some common bonds.

Williams, a Nebraska native, can almost come across as shy. That's not a trait associated with Costolo, a former improvisational comedian in Chicago.

Both Williams and Costolo have previously cashed in as entrepreneurs who sold startups to Google Inc.

Williams sold a blogging service, Blogger, to the Internet search leader in 2003; Costolo sold an online advertising tool called FeedBurner to Google in 2007.

It didn't take Williams or Costolo long to realize they prefer running their own companies, so they left Google.

Google is now widely seen as a potential suitor for Twitter. Williams, Costolo and Twitter's third co-founder, Biz Stone, have all said they are interested in maintaining Twitter's independence, although they concede Google or another bidder could make an offer their investors couldn't refuse.

Besides Costolo and its co-founders, Twitter is owned by venture capital funds that have poured about $155 million into the company so far.

Storing tweets requires four petabytes of data a year

Twitter analytics lead, Kevin Weil, spoke recently at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York and revealed some interesting information about Twitter and its infrastructure.

Weil said that all of tweets, which are limited to just 140 characters, add up to 12 terabytes of storage every day. He said, "that would translate to four petabytes a year, if we weren't growing."

All that data is being analyzed by Weil and his team to attempt to find information that would be useful to help make Twitter a profitable business. Twitter has been working hard to become profitable, they recently made major changes to their website in an attempt to increase user engagement.

Twitter is using user data to determine whether their changes are successful. They track users who have been inactive for some time and suddenly become active again. They match the time the user becomes active with changes they have made to determine the success of those changes.

Twitter is also analyzing what influences a retweet, what tweets are most successful. They are using "machine learning techniques" to figure out which tweets resonate most with users.

According to The Technology Review Blog, "Twitter benefits from a variety of open-source software developed by companies such as Google, Yahoo, and Facebook. These tools are designed to deal with storing and processing data that's too voluminous to manage on even the largest single machine."

Gathering and storing all of this data has been an issue for Twitter, they currently operate on a 100-machine cluster which can not completely handle the load. They plan to move to a new data center later this year with three to four times the capacity of their current data center.

Twitter to Roll Out Free Analytics Tool This Year

Twitter will start offering a real-time analytics tool to its users which will start testing later this year. The tool will highlight viral tweets, influential users and other trends in real-time. The feature will apparently be offered for free.

Web analytics company WebTrends reported that Twitter's business development exec Ross Hoffman announced at the Sports Marketing 2.0 Summit that it plans to launch an analytics feature in the fourth quarter.

The feature will have a small roll out at first. Since this was a sports event, the announcement said that people in sports will get access to the feature. It can be safely assumed that it will be made available for everyone at a later point.

Twitter regularly beta tests new features with a small number of users as they are being developed to ensure that the teams working on them get real-world feedback.

While the beta test is scheduled to start in the last quarter, there's no date for a wider roll out.

An analytics tool has been rumored to be a part of Twitter's plans for quite a while, most recently this summer when it acquired Trendly, makers of an analytics dashboard.

Twitter isn't confirming anything at the moment, except for the fact that it has been thinking at an analytics tool for some while now.

Twitter has said that analytics was one of the ways it plans to make money. This was a full year ago when the company was still talking about premium accounts.

Apparently, those are still on the table, though the company has went ahead with other monetization schemes, particularly the one thing it vowed to never to do - advertising.

The new analytics tools will actually leverage the same Twitter Resonance algorithm it uses to determine the top tweets as well as how well a Promoted Ad is doing.

Twitter Tweet Button Now Available

Today Twitter announced the availability of a new button that you can place on your website to help your website visitors tweet your content to their followers.

According to the Pushing Our (Tweet) Button blog entry a quarter of the tweets that are sent on the service contains links – no doubt this button is intended to make that process easier for all users.

The Tweet Button is not only simple for users, but for publishers of all sizes, too. Recreational bloggers to large media companies can quickly and easily add the Tweet Button to their sites. It only takes a few lines of code.

 

Now if this new button looks a little familiar then that might be because it looks and functions a lot like the green TweetMeme buttons that are on so many websites.  Well believe it or not TweetMeme collaborated with Twitter to implement this functionality.  You can read more about that partnership here – Twitter Tweet Button – and also see what their next big project is.

And to think I thought Twitter was pushing out another third party app with their development of this tool.

Twitter launches 'Suggestions For You' feature

Twitter has over 100 million users and is expanding its network with a whole new, "Suggestions For You" feature, which can be related to the similar Facebook "People You May Know" application. The feature enables access to a database of millions of Twitter users, and gives you suggestions to friends you may wish to follow.

Similar to the Facebook friend suggestion feature, it allows you to see a list of people that you are not following currently, but may be interested in. Matching you up with people who are following the same people as you. It has the option for one click follow, as well as being able to hide them. If they are hidden, they will not be suggested again.

It will also record which user accounts you visit and gives you a new set of suggestions for people that you may wish to follow. All these features are available to developers and soon to be present 3rd party applications.

"We will be launching an API so third parties can provide these suggestion features in your favorite desktop, mobile, and web applications, too." Said cpen of the Twitter Blog.

The feature is available now for all users of Twitter.

Twitter Rolls Out New Friend Suggestion Feature

Today, Twitter will be rolling out a powerful new feature for its users, helping people connect with the million of other Twitter users by way of the new “Suggestion for You” tool.

Utilizing algorithms developed by Twitter’s relevence team, the Suggestions for You feature will suggest people that a Twitter user doesn’t already follow and prompt them to connect if they find them interesting. The suggestions are apparently formulated by analyzing the people a user follows and in-turn the users they follow.

If the friend suggestion isn’t a good one, the user can click “hide” and they will not be suggested to that user in the future.

Suggestions will be made via Twitter.com and under the Find People page and when browsing the user profiles, Twitter will automatically recommend similar users on that page.

The new features will be available to developers via an API, allowing them to incorporate the new friend suggestions into your popular Twitter clients also.

Twitter’s new additions bear a striking resemblance to Facebook’s “Friends You Might Know” feature, there is no indication if you can opt out of the feature.

Microsoft Hardware Team is on Twitter

The Microsoft Hardware Team has joined Twitter.

Follow them --> @msfthardware

Twitter adding Tweet Media feature

For a short time yesterday, some users saw a setting called Tweet Media which said, "By default, you'll only see images and videos shared by people you're following, and reveal those by people you're not. Check this box to see media from everyone on Twitter."

The feature suggests that Twitter will be adding multimedia into the Twitter.com streams. This would change the Twitter experience pretty dramatically. This feature would make your Twitter.com stream look really similar to your Facebook stream.

Shortly after the update was discovered by users Twitter disabled it and issued a statement to Mashable confirming they are working on new features for Twitter.com. "We’re constantly exploring features and settings. What you saw was a small test of a potential consumption setting for inline media. We show inline media on our own iPhone and Android apps."

Twitter is working hard to become profitable but it will not be easy for them. According to a recent study conducted by USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism (PDF), 0% of the survey participants said they would consider paying for Twitter. 55% of respondents said they would be willing to put up with advertising, though, which is the way Twitter seems to be moving. They recently added the Earlybird service, which is a Twitter account called @earlybird that they will be updating periodically with exclusive offers and select advertising. The benefit to this type of advertising is that it is only displayed to those who choose to follow @earlybird. Those that don't will not see the ads.

Oldest twitterer dies, age 104

Ivy Bean, who became an online celebrity as the oldest known user of micro-blogging site Twitter, has died at the age of 104.

Pat Wright, manager of the care home where she lived in Bradford, northern England, says Bean died peacefully early Wednesday.

Wright said Bean "grabbed new technology. She would try anything."

Bean joined Twitter in 2008 and amassed more than 56,000 followers. They included Sarah Brown, wife of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who tweeted on Wednesday: "Sad to hear the news of Ivy Bean's passing. A great spirit and sense of humor; highly respected senior ambassador for Twitter."

Bean's last tweet was July 6. It read, "going to have my lunch now will be back later."

Now you can Tweet from GTalk too

1. First start G Talk and Login

2. Then Go To Tweet.Im . To sign up, you just need a Twitter account and a Google Talk account

3. Once you register on Tweet.im you would see that there is a Friend request from YourTwitterName@twitter.tweet.im .

4. Accept that Tweet invitation. Now whenever you want to tweet just use it to tweet just like you chat with your friend.

Twitter can't handle the load

In the past few weeks many users have been noticing several problems with the popular social networking site Twitter. Sean Garrett of the Twitter communications team has made a post on the Twitter blog about the recent problems they have been having.

Twitter were trying to get their systems ready in time for the starting of the World Cup but complications caused the maintenance to take far longer than anticipated. They have been trying to tweak their systems with very small, minor changes. However, these small changes have led to the discovery of deeper issues with the site. This is what is causing the unexpected downtime that users have been experiencing. This coupled with the huge increase in traffic due to the World Cup has led to Twitter's worst month since last October in terms of up-time and stability.

The problems are not over either, Twitter is planning several periods of "down-time" in the coming two weeks in order to finish their maintenance. They have, however, promised that prior notice will be given to users and the down-time will not affect people tweeting over the World Cup games.

There is good news though, the changes that they are currently implementing "will make Twitter much more reliable in the future" and will hopefully reduce the chances of this happening again.

Twitter Places Feature Goes Live

The long discussed integration of location services and Twitter has gone live.

…you can tag Tweets with specific places, including all World Cup stadiums in South Africa, and create new Twitter Places. You can also click a Twitter Place within a Tweet to see recent Tweets from a particular location. Try it out during the next match—you will be able to see Tweets coming from the stadium.

Beyond opening the API up so developers can include the Twitter Places functionality and providing support for more browsers they have also integrated the two most popular location services:

Foursquare and Gowalla integration: Many Foursquare and Gowalla users publish check-ins to Twitter. Location is a key component of these Tweets, so we worked closely with both companies to associate a Twitter Place with Tweets generated by these services. This means that if you click on a Twitter Place, such as "Ritual Roasters," you will see standard Tweets and check-ins from Foursquare and Gowalla.

Twitter Places: More Context For Your Tweets

Length Doesn't Matter: Twitter forcing universal URL shortening soon

"Length doesn't matter" according to Twitter this week, with Twitter announcing that they will begin routing all links that travel through it's site through their own link shortening service, including links that are sent from the web interface and any third party clients.

Twitter said in a blog post that they've actually been performing shortening on links sent through Direct Message already, but will expanding it to the entire service "this summer". In the blog post, they say that this is to "detect, intercept and prevent the spread of malware, phishing and other dangers", and that they will "present users with a page that warns them of potentially malicious content if they click blacklisted links".

Direct Messages are currently shortened using a "twt.tl" link, but when the service is rolled out to all tweets, the links will be shortened to a "t.co" link. This shortening will happen even if the link has already been shortened by a third party service - such as bit.ly.

The shortening service will also shorten long links into the t.co format for SMS display, but potentially will be displayed to users as part of the actual destination URL on their PC. Also, the blog post says that "In addition to a better user experience and increased safety, routing links through this service will eventually contribute to the metrics behind our Promoted Tweets platform and provide an important quality signal for our Resonance algorithm—the way we determine if a Tweet is relevant and interesting to users."

Developers that create applications on the Twitter platform can start getting their applications ready now, and they've rolled out wrapped links to a few accounts, @TwitterAPI, @rsarver, and @raffi to help developers test their code.

Twitter Gets Involved in World Cup 2010

We already know that Twitter will be a central point of information from fans across the globe as they watch their teams participate in this years World Cup competition.

Twitter is there to harvest all that information and get it in one place for you:

Using live widgets, real-time search, and Top Tweets (updates that are currently catching the attention of many Twitter users) we’ve put together a special site to capture the spirit of the World Cup and it’s already pulsing with activity. Fans have a unique opportunity to connect with players, teams, and brands using Twitter to join the matches in a new way. We also are providing a list of suggested accounts to follow during the tournament and a World Cup theme for your profile page. We’ll leave it up to you to learn how to do the neat little trick we’re calling hashflags.

 

Twitter You Both Follow Feature Rolling Out

Twitter has begun the roll out of a new feature on their web based interface that will show you the overlap between you and someone you follow. This is practically an exact duplication of Facebook’s Mutual Friends feature.

Sachin Tendulkar joins Twitter! Follow now

Worlds most popular Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar (also know as ‘The God of Cricket’) has finally joined twitter, the famous social networking and micro blogging service. You can now catch Sachin’s tweets by following his genuine twitter account.

Follow Sachin Tendulkar on Twitter @sachin_rt  [Official Profile]

Twitter Starts Countdown to OAuth

Better security is on its way from Twitter. The guys over there have begun a count down clock heading towards 30 June 2010.

What will happen that day you ask?

On June 30, 2010 (9 weeks and 3 days from now), the @twitterapi team will be shutting off basic authentication on the Twitter API — you can see the announcement here. This has been previously announced. All applications, by this date, need to switch to using OAuth. Don’t fret! @twitterapi is here to help! Feel free to reach out to us directly, or via our Twitter Development Talk group.

There is apparently one exception that was posted on the Twitter API Google Groups page by Raffi Krikorian:

I was just reminded about a point of clarification – streaming API will still support basic auth.  This note *only* pertains to the REST API.

You can see the active clock yourself at http://www.countdowntooauth.com/