July 16, 2008
Twitter to rank "most popular" tweets
The switch will introduce even more jostling for position, rabid use among the twitterati.
Finally, Twitter will be allowing tweets to be searched by most popular and not just most recent, according to an update from Twitter Developer Advocate Taylor Singletary. The switch constitutes a plate shift for the company, which to date has given equal weight to all users in search results, filtering them only by time.Developers of Twitter apps will soon be able to present tweets sorted according to popularity thanks to a new metadata section to in the search results payload served to apps. Singletary explained the new feature on the Twitter API message board:
The Search team is working on a beta project that returns the most popular tweets for a query, rather than only the most recent tweets. This is a beta project, but an important first step to surface the most popular tweets for users searching Twitter.
You can expect many improvements as we tune and tweak our algorithms, but we want to give everyone a heads up so we can go over the implications for those consuming the search API.
The feature tweak implies that Twitter’s usefulness has grown beyond real-time socializing to providing a filterable index of web activity. Some folks may be put off by the feature will introduce a hierarchy among tweets that had been left to third parties to date. The competition to improve in the official popularity rankings will likely have the same effect that publicly displaying follower numbers—competition and ego-boosting will ensure even more rabid use of the service.
We’ve reached out to both Singletary and Twitter CEO Evan Williams for comment on the new feature and will update the post if we hear back.
Update:Twitter VP of Communications Sean Garrett tells us the company hasn't decided whether search.twitter.com will also provide tweets ranked by popularity. As for the broader implications, Garret says "our intent here is to explore the impact of relevance as it meets recency."
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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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