Defense Dept. may OK social media surfing

Ronny Kerr · September 30, 2009 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/ae6

Latest draft policy from Defense Department would enable social networking for military

Remember how the Department of Defense embraced Web 2.0 with open arms? The U.S. Army, for example, has set up multiple accounts across the most popular social networking sites--Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and more--in a clear effort to reach towards a new generation of Web surfers, a new category of potential recruits.

While recruitment efforts flourished on the social Web for months, however, individual troops continually faced morphing policies at bases that ruled whether they were allowed to access their social networking accounts, or not.

If the latest draft policy gets approved, military employees and troops may soon enjoy the full expanse of Web 2.0 themselves. According to the draft memo, gathered by Nextgov, they will be granted access to social networking sites in addition to as "e-mail, instant messaging and discussion forums."

This would be a welcome change to troops abroad, who likely grew very accustomed to using social media while at home. While in another country, the significance of these communication tools multiply.

In early August, the Marine Corps completely banned troops from accessing Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites, deciding to wait on the results of a comprehensive review by the Pentagon. Military officials wanted to know exactly the risks of letting individual soldiers onto potentially vulnerable networks. A week earlier, Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn ordered the review to be done by the end of August.

Confronting a highly advanced Internet, where risks are indeed serious and sites are vulnerable, Lynn in the review says the document "addresses important changes in the way the Department of Defense communicates and shares information on the Internet."

Unfortunately, troops will have to wait a little bit longer to hear official word.

"No decisions have been made," said Pentagon social media czar Price Floyd. "The memo hasn't gone to the leadership yet."

Ronny Kerr

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What is Twitter?

Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.

Where did the idea for Twitter come from?

Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.

How is Twitter built?

Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.

We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.

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There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.

In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.

At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.

Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.

What's next for Twitter?

We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.

We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.