October 20, 2008
New feature lets Twitter users organize the people they want to follow into individual categories
Twitter, the popular micro-blogging startup officially launched a new feature on its site called, "Lists." The feature lets users create their own categories of people they'd like to follow. For example, I recently set one up called, "@chriscaceres/startups," (feel free to follow it by the way) and I'm adding to the list every time I get a new business card.
The feature seems to be a response to recent indications that Twitter's traffic has been declining. It makes sense, as users have built large lists of hundreds of followers, all you seem to see is a random clutter of noise, you might miss out on certain Tweets if following, say 400 other Twitter accounts. This could in fact be a key reason for people disengaging from visiting Twitter.
I for one, downloaded the third party Twitter application "TweetDeck," which already lets users build and categorize their own "group columns," allowing users to filter out users to have customized streams.
In the case of my "startups" list, I will now only see Tweets from the companies I choose to put in there. This additional feature definitely will bring me back to engage with Twitter's actual site.
For developers, Twitter's also opened up its "Lists" features on its API.
Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter said in a blog post, "We believe Lists will be a new discovery mechanism for great tweets and accounts."
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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.
How do you make money from Twitter?
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.
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