The Palin Peak

Governor Palin's speech at the Republican National Convention last night corresponded with a dramatic increase of tweets per second. This graph represents hourly update activity on Twitter over two days this week. Like hurricane Gustav on Monday, and Google's new browser launch on Tuesday, Palin's official nomination acceptance on Wednesday is another example of Twitter being used in real-time during a massively shared event. We continue to see increased activity during storms, earthquakes, breaking news, and more but Politics in particular continues to drive updates, discussion, interaction, and other sustained activity on Twitter.

C—SPAN has built an interesting Twitter integration and Leslie Bradshaw often shares updates on air. CNN also makes use of Twitter and Rick Sanchez has also been broadcasting updates on television as well. The National Press Club recently held a Twitter training session for journalists in advance of convention reporting and there are over 30 members of congress using Twitter. US politics in 2008 is definitely a-Twitter and that's good for us.

This election year will continue to generate activity on Twitter. Search is a good way to follow Political action as we head to the debates and the election in November. API projects like Politweets are another interesting way to take the nation's pulse. We're on the lookout for more like this and we're interested in facilitating much of this discourse from a features standpoint when it makes sense. Interesting stuff!

Trimming the Sails

I wanted to take a moment to share more than 140 characters about Twitter's continued reliability improvements and how we've made it here.

I've always respected a good sense of pacing. It's easy to be fast and loose, but it takes a certain discipline, foresight, and patience to guide something through the right way. For most of Twitter's early days, pacing could be considered an unattainable luxury. Our effort started with a bang and quickly accelerated to a disconcerting velocity that never let up. We found ourselves reacting to situations instead of crafting solutions and features we wanted to make.

With nearly two years at full speed, thousands of successes (with as many mistakes), and countless lessons learned, we've finally discovered our rhythm as a team. By carefully regrouping all aspects of our work, breaking the problem down into smaller parts, and iterating rapidly, Twitter, Inc. is poised to bring a new kind of communication to every part of the world.

While our focus on building a stable service is well known, we haven't discussed how we've been organizing our work internally. Twitter is a small company of only 24 full time employees and a network of contractors working in 6 discrete, nimble teams:

Product. Define, design, and support the Twitter products and programs.

User Experience. Craft the user experiences of our products, and develop tools that safeguard those experiences.

API. Develop and manage programmatic access to our services, and vitalize the developer community to harness those services.

Services. Architect and develop our core applications and services.

Operations. Architect, deploy, operate, measure, and monitor our infrastructure, products and services.

The team responsible for the company itself is my team. Our goal is to create an engaging and energetic environment in which to work, and to provide all the other teams with the necessary human, financial, and directional resources they need to make Twitter a success. Each team is staffed by a small number of people working together to craft every detail, always informed by testing, measurement, simple planning and tracking, and lots of creativity.

It's taken some time to put everything in its right place. We're proud of what we've built, and now more than ever, we're proud of how we're building it.

HuffPo Twittering from the DNC

The folks over at The Huffington Post have put together a Twitter account updating live from the Democratic National Convention. You can visit their site or follow them on Twitter.

Turning Up The Heat On Spam

Twitter is not in the inflatable boat business contrary to this week's flavor of spam. Despite the fact that there are apparently lots of "surprisingly attractive" inflatable boats available for financing, these updates and other spammy accounts are unwanted junk affecting good user experience. Inflatable boats will sink as we work to fry all forms of Twitter spam. So, what are we doing?

Suspended Accounts

Today, we launched a new admin tool which allows us to more efficiently deal with spam when we spot it. Our support staff can now more easily review and suspend spam accounts as well as visibly change the content on the profile to read, "This account is currently suspended and is being investigated due to strange activity," so that others may be warned.

Community Powered Alerts

Suspending a spam account only works after it's already caused some damage. We have enhanced our admin tools to more accurately factor your feedback for a more timely diagnosis. When you block a spam account, we take note—when more people start blocking a spam account, we go to red alert. Blocking also puts that account out of sight and out of mind so you don't have to see it anymore.

Dedicated Personnel

It's unfortunate that this has to be done but we're going to hire people whose full time job will be the systematic identification and removal of spam on Twitter. These folks will work together with our support team, and our automatic spam tools. Our first "spam marshal" is starting at Twitter next week.

As always, fighting spam is a sustained activity. There is no magic wand we can wave or switch we can flip to make it all go away. Spammers will keep finding inventive new ways to advance their motives and harm user experience and we'll keep shutting them down and slowing their progress. We just wanted to make sure everyone knows that we are taking spam seriously.

Mobilizing His Followers

This AP story points out that Mr. Obama is harnessing the real-time power of Twitter to mobilize his followers to vote. I can just picture the tweet come November: "Hoping you'll go make me president—right now!"

Obama's campaign has used the Internet to boost fundraising, building upon Howard Dean's Web strategy in 2004, but the campaign's use of text messaging has the potential to mobilize voters in a new way.

Obama's campaign has encouraged supporters to sign up for e-mails and text messages and sent text messages to voters on the days of key primary contests. The messages also helped encourage supporters to attend local events and tune into Obama television appearances.

On the Web, Obama's Twitter site now has more than 60,000 followers, who receive updates from Obama's town hall meetings and links to his Web site.

Nick Shapiro, an Obama spokesman, declined to release the number of cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses the campaign has amassed. He said the text messaging has been "valuable because not everyone sits in front of a computer or a television."

The article also mentions that "Republican John McCain's campaign, meanwhile, has not highlighted text messages," Instead McCain is going old-school with viral YouTube videos, "McCain's recent 'Celeb' ad, which compared Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, has received about 2 million hits on YouTube."

Twitter+Chumby

The Chumby is consumer electronics product that displays ambient infotainment. It's a squishy little deal that connects to wifi and runs widgets you download from chumby.com. Today Chumby Industries announced that they have added a Twitter widget and a Twitter Search widget to their directory. You can try the widgets out on their site. Chumby!

Alex Payne, API Lead

The Twitter API has grown over the past 2 years and become very important to Twitter as well as developers who build on our services. This has all happened despite the fact that we could only spare one engineer to work on the API about half of his time. Things are changing.

Alex Payne has been leading much of our API development since he started working on Twitter in March, 2007. As part of a larger plan to dedicate more resources to developers, Alex has taken the official role of API Lead. Twitter engineer Matt Sanford will join him in focusing on our developer offerings.

We're thrilled that Alex has taken the lead on our API. And Matt's familiarity with our search API is critical as we continue to integrate the technology we brought to Twitter as part of our recent search acquisition. With Alex and Matt focusing on our developer offerings full time, there's a lot in store.

Some SMS Perspective

On Wednesday, we announced that Twitter has suspended outgoing SMS to our UK number. The blue in the chart above illustrates the percent of outgoing SMS we stopped sending. 2% of our user base consumed 4% of our outbound SMS over the UK number at a price which disproportionately impacted overall operational cost. Nevertheless, this 2% is important to us and the UK number remains active for incoming SMS. We send out a large amount of SMS traffic—most of it going to The United States, Canada, and India where we have established sustainable billing rates with mobile operators and we don't pass any expense on to users.

Why Not Charge Users?

We considered passing the cost (as much as 73 euros per month for 35 tweets a day in some markets) of outgoing SMS on to users through a billing mechanism. However, international billing is a significant project and not something we are comfortable focusing on before we have a dependable offering. It's not right to charge for spotty service—and we know there are bugs. People have had trouble setting up SMS, sometimes messages don't make it to their destination, and sometimes there are duplicate messages.

The Show Must Go On

We love SMS. The lowest common denominator aspect of this service is a defining part of Twitter. We want to provide ubiquitous access in a way that is sustainable for both us and our users. We've done it for 96% of our current SMS traffic and we think we can do it for the rest. But it will take time and we will need help. In the meantime, updates to the UK number still work, more numbers are on the way (hopefully we can get Australia a local number before I am fed to a crocodile), and there are several alternatives for receiving updates.