I’ll miss working with the incredibly smart and talented people I got to know there. But I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.]]>
In other words, Erdogan’s strategy is to demonize social media.
It is a strategy of placing social media outside the sacred sphere, as a disruption of family, as a threat to unity, as an outside blade tearing at the fabric of society. Excellent contextual piece. Erdogan is not a fool.]]>
Haider will assume the role of Android lead for Secret, where she’ll be responsible for launching an Android version of the app as soon as possible. (Currently, Secret is only available on iOS devices.) At Twitter, Haider worked to launch the Android version of the company’s Vine video app, and for years also worked on the Android app for Twitter proper.
Along with Haider, Twitter confirmed to Re/code that Vice President of Analytics and Business Intelligence Cayley Torgeson also plans to leave the company. Cashing out their stock?]]>
If this was a new startup, a one or two person shop, I’d give it a thumbs up for innovation and good execution on a simple but viral idea.
But the fact that this is coming from Odeo makes me wonder – what is this company doing to make their core offering compelling? The comments (look for the ones marked "eight years ago") are gold.]]>
At least that’s the impression Vivian Schiller, head of news at Twitter, gave addressing the crowd two days ago at the Newspaper Association of America’s mediaXchange conference in Denver. During her talk, Schiller called at-replies and hashtags “arcane” and hinted that Twitter might soon move them into the background of the service. "Streamlined" isn't the same as "phased out". But to the average person, the grammar of Twitter is arcane.]]>
There is a good reason Goldman Sachs has been unable to uncover its Twitter-happy employee: He doesn’t work at the firm. And he never did.
The author is a 34-year-old former bond executive who lives in Texas. The official Goldman Sachs statement is hilarious. As are @GSElevator tweets such as this one.]]>
"It's not necessary that people feel Google or Facebook has done anything bad with data to date. It's what might happen in the future. It's a nebulous fear," said Laura Simpson, global director of McCann Truth Central, during a session on privacy held by Ad Age and IPG at CES in Las Vegas.
By comparison, Amazon topped the list of companies consumers trust with their data, with 73% of respondents citing the e-commerce giant. It's worth noting that a majority of respondents also named Google to this category, but that number fell from 63% in 2011 to 53% in 2013. Twitter is seen as a threat to privacy? ]]>
Here’s the deal, YouTube user GhostlyRich posted a video on YouTube in early December that showed that his Samsung Galaxy S4 caught fire while charging. While the battery did not explode (thankfully) you can clearly see the charging port is burnt. To no surprise, a burnt charging point rendered the device useless and seeing that the Phone is still under warranty, you would think Samsung would simply exchange the device and make good with the consumer to fix the issue.
Wrong. What Samsung has done, foolishly, is sent the user a document saying that they will exchange his defective device only after he pulls his initial video from YouTube. If Samsung was unaware of how the internet works, it’s about to find out that trying to quiet the user will result in a black eye for the company. Original video: 45,000 views. Demand letter: 277,000 views. (Thanks @ClarkeViper for the link.)]]>
The sheer volume of the operation was astounding.]]>
And the database is free for the public to search at Topsy.com. Want to see what people are saying about President Obama and the Syria vote in Congress? A quick search pulls up what Topsy’s algorithm thinks are the most relevant results, factoring in retweets and the past influence of the tweeter. You can narrow down results by time frame, search for tweets in 10 languages, and see a graph with the volume of tweets over time and an indicator of the general sentiment, positive or negative. Big achievement. Even Twitter uses it (in the paid-for form).]]>
Twitter’s usage is always growing rapidly, and doing the math there, it would take a lot of machines to keep up with the growth curve.
At the time, Twitter had experience deploying fairly large scale JVM-based services –– our search engine was written in Java, and our Streaming Api infrastructure as well as Flock, our social graph system, was written in Scala. We were enamoured by the level of performance that the JVM gave us. It wasn’t going to be easy to get our performance, reliability, and efficiency goals out of the Ruby VM, so we embarked on writing code to be run on the JVM instead. We estimated that rewriting our codebase could get us > 10x performance improvement, on the same hardware –– and now, today, we push on the order of 10 - 20K requests / sec / host. Incidental: successive tweets are no longer incremented by 1. Really fascinating blogpost about the big and small picture of dealing with huge real-time demand, and how to retool for it.]]>
When Twitter receives a new login request with a username and password, the server sends a challenge based on a 190-bit, 32 character random nonce, to the mobile app — along with a notification that gives the user the time, location, and browser information associated with the login request. The user can then opt to approve or deny this login request. If approved, the app replies to a challenge with its private key, relays that information back to the server. The server compares that challenge with a request ID, and if it authenticates, the user is automatically logged in. Think that's clever? Wait until you read the solution for how it does it when you don't have your phone.]]>
Over the last 12 hours alone, the Wimbledon final has been mentioned more than 3.4m times on Twitter. The peak in mentions of the match came at its climax at 17.25 BST with 120,000 Tweets per minute. That outstripped the 116,000 Tweets per minute that happened during the Spice Girls’ performance at last summer’s Olympics, a moment that saw the largest spike in Tweets per minute of the London 2012 Games.]]>
The mountain ranges you see here are not natural geography but the landscape of Tweets — billions of them, visualized across cities. The peaks represent the places most Tweets are sent from, the troughs the fewest. Explore New York closely and you can pick out the Brooklyn and the Queensboro bridge — even the Staten Island ferry.Hugely cool.]]>
Vine sharing on Twitter has tanked. Vine's problem is twofold - it's slow to load, and it's not embedded into the Twitter app (yet), whereas Instagram introduced video with an app update.]]>
The developer warns that the situation could mean the end of Falcon Pro, but hopefully we'll be able to enjoy one of the best third-party Twitter clients out there once again.
Joaquim Verges thinks that the reason why the token pool was exhausted so quickly after the reset was a landgrab that occurred when people learned about the reset. Also, some users have more than one account, which further uses up tokens. A re-run of what happened in February.]]>
To manage its TweetDeck product, Twitter’s Engineering Manager Tom Woolway announced that the company has hired The Guardian’s Sharath Bulusu. Previously, Bulusu was the Group Product Manager at the publication leading its Content Platforms team.]]>
Action was swiftly taken and we are working with Twitter and our in house security to ensure this cannot happen again. Perhaps a hacker could break into Dick Costolo's Twitter account so that two-factor authentication suddenly goes to the top of the to-do list there.]]>
At this point the editorial staff began publishing articles inspired by the attack. The second article, Syrian Electronic Army Has A Little Fun Before Inevitable Upcoming Deaths At Hands Of Rebels, angered the attacker who then began posting editorial emails on their Twitter account. Once we discovered this, we decided that we could not know for sure which accounts had been compromised and forced a password reset on every staff member’s Google Apps account. ]]>
But the names that went out over first social networks and then news blogs and websites were not Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, which the Federal Bureau of Investigation released early this morning. Instead, two other people wholly unconnected to the case, became, for a while, two of America's most notorious alleged criminals. Excellent recounting of a terrible, confused night.]]>
The result is the Twitter chatbot @AI_AGW. Its operation is fairly simple: Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn’t happening or humans aren’t responsible for it.
It then spits back at the twitterer who made that argument a canned response culled from a database of hundreds. The responses are matched to the argument in question – tweets about how Neptune is warming just like the earth, for example, are met with the appropriate links to scientific sources explaining why that hardly constitutes evidence that the source of global warming on earth is a warming sun. Unfortunately, the account seems to have been suspended. Boo.]]>
Twitter has stopped being fun.
I started Twit Cleaner in 2009. Given that I haven't managed to develop a livable income out of it in that time (barring donations from you many wonderful, generous people), it's pretty obvious I'm not in it for the money. It's been my primary occupation over that time, and absorbed several thousand hours of coding, designing, building, testing and supporting it. Everything on Twit Cleaner (bar some low level server decisions), I've personally done.
I wanted to make Twitter a better place for everyone. I love to code. I love helping people. That's it.
Unfortunately, the new API is so crippling that Twit Cleaner is unable to continue. If I can't even maintain the base service, I certainly can't (won't) roll out any new functionality I had planned, all of which sits on top of Twitter's APIs. Another one bites the dust.]]>
At Twitter, a small team of engineers has built a similar system using a software platform originally developed by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley. Known as Mesos, this software platform is open source — meaning it’s freely available to anyone — and it’s gradually spreading to other operations as well.
The Borg moniker is only appropriate. Google’s system provides a central brain for controlling tasks across the company’s data centers. Rather than building a separate cluster of servers for each software system — one for Google Search, one for Gmail, one for Google Maps, etc. — Google can erect a cluster that does several different types of work at the same time. All this work is divided into tiny tasks, and Borg sends these tasks wherever it can find free computing resources, such as processing power or computer memory or storage space.
Wilkes says it’s like taking a massive pile of wooden blocks — blocks of all different shapes and sizes — and finding a way to pack all those blocks into buckets. The blocks are the computer tasks. And the buckets are the servers. The trick is to make sure you never waste any of the extra space in the buckets. Fascinating article, though you can feel both writer and speakers struggling to find useful similes for what's being done. (Thanks @tehgreatgonzo for the link.)]]>
Who is affected?
If you're a site owner that uses one of the older "goodie" widgets (e.g. profile, favorites, search and list widgets), you should move to Embedded Timelines as soon as possible. Likewise, if you've built your own widgets using unauthenticated client-side API calls, or if you or your widget consumes data from RSS or ATOM feeds, you should also migrate to Embedded Timelines. Unauthenticated requests are not supported in API v1.1. First "blackout test" on 5 March, but no definite date for lights out on API v1 yet.]]>
BREAKING: Social Media Addict Switches Telephone Brands
— NextTechBlog (@NextTechBlog) February 19, 2013 ]]>On April 30th, we will turn off posterous.com and our mobile apps in order to focus 100% of our efforts on Twitter. This means that as of April 30, Posterous Spaces will no longer be available either to view or to edit. Lights out, or a new dawn?]]>
When it comes to second-screen advertising, it’s Twitter’s world now and there’s no close second place.
Last year, brands split their focus on Twitter and Facebook with eight mentions each. This year, brands recognize that Twitter is where they need to try to attract the online conversation around one of the world’s biggest events.]]>
This means that if you currently use signed 32-bit integers to track user IDs in your system, you should update your code to use 64-bit integers as soon as you can. To be safe, and to provide a date to aim for, we recommend making this change by July 1, 2013. This includes statically typed variables in your application code and column types in your database code. Twitter is thinking big.]]>
60% of Twitter users access the social network while watching TV.
40% of all UK Twitter traffic around peak time is about TV.
More than 90% of online public conversations about TV are on Twitter. Includes graphs showing relevant tweets about Homeland, and X Factor, and other shows. The tweets around Homeland follow a bathtub shape - start and end, almost silent in between. X-Factor, everyone's shouting all the time.]]>
In December of 2011, Twitter restructured its site (and later, apps) around four streams: Home, Connect, Discover and Me. Home and Me were minor updates to the familiar tweet list and profile, respectively, but Connect and Discover were different — particularly when it came to favorites. December was when they became truly visible for the first time.
Connect added "Interactions," which shows you clearly, in a list, who's been faving your tweets. Favourite, dammit. Favourites - also known as "the silent retweet" - have started moving up, as the graph on the story shows. Don't get distracted by the Sidebar of Stuff.]]>
While users can still post links to their Instagram photos on Twitter, they’ll no longer be able to view Instagram photos from within the Twitter stream across both the Twitter Web site and mobile apps. That's really rubbish.]]>
It’s no accident that this sounds exactly like the emerging Facebook business model. As discussed in that link, algorithmically filtered primary feeds are vastly easier to advertise against vs unfiltered feeds. The issue for Twitter is that Facebook already has a far larger userbase which is already trained to read an algorithmically filtered feed. Seen through the lens of its 100,000 token limit - and subsequent choking of Tweetro - this makes rather horrible sense.]]>
If you want to be absolutely safe, instead of clicking the links in the email, instead open your browser and type in “twitter.com” and try to login. Twitter.com will then redirect you to change your password.]]>
Instead, Twitter shattered a number of records during the election as people, including the President Obama, took to the social network to share results, commentary and quote speeches. Handled about 43 times more tweets per second in 2008.]]>
The algorithm could be of great interest to Twitter, which could charge a premium for ads linked to popular topics, but it also represents a new approach to statistical analysis that could, in theory, apply to any quantity that varies over time: the duration of a bus ride, ticket sales for films, maybe even stock prices. Oooo.]]>
We haven’t talked about this publicly because it’s not what people using Twitter every day care about.]]>
Engagement is certainly the metric that matters to marketers: if people don’t see your message, they cannot act on it. But follower count has long been a source of perceived legitimacy for some, and Twitter has previously taken steps to reduce its impact. Twitter even completely hit the reset button on follower account temporarily, after the infamous auto-follow bug. But to whom will this metric be visible? Followers is crude, but it has a simply understood meaning.]]>
Miller said in a Friday Tweet that starting Monday he would be working with the security team at the Microblogging service. Miller made no mention of how long or in what capacity he would be working with the company.
A legend amongst the hacking and security research communities, Miller has become a favourite presenter at the Black Hat conference for his extensive investigations into the fundamental security structure and potential security vulnerabilities in platforms such as NFC hardware and notebook battery packs. Miller is ex-NSA and indeed legenday.]]>
In May, the Turkish government announced the new measure would take place in August and thousands of Turks concentrated in some 40 cities and towns around the country. Turkey’s Internet regulator wanted to introduce a selection of filters that users would choose from before browsing the Internet. Also, some words could be banned, such as “blond” and “sister-in-law”. There have been suspicions, which we've been unable to confirm, that Turkey has attempted some internet filtering of content moving in and out of the country.]]>
To take a smaller example, Twitter swapped out co-founder Evan Williams and replaced him with Dick Costolo, someone with no personal stake in the early vision of the network. Has that been a good thing or a bad thing? It has certainly changed the orientation of the company towards revenue-generating models like advertising — a move that appears to be driven primarily by a desire to justify the company’s alleged market value. Would it have been better to stick with a founder as CEO? And if it wasn’t better for Twitter, then why is it better for Facebook? ]]>
We’re re-doubling our efforts to bring you an all-new version of Twitterrific: one that complies with Twitter’s new guidelines and makes reading and posting to Twitter even easier and more fun. So who exactly is affected by this Twitter change? ]]>