June 6, 2011
New to Twitter: link shortener and Portuguese
Automatic link shortening, Brazilian Portuguese support and Lynn Fox hired as PR director
Here are a few new updates and news bits rolled out for the Twittersphere this week.
Automatic link shortening
The biggest news is that Twitter.com now supports automatic link shortening. Not all users have the feature yet, but they will soon.
Designed so that no action is required on the user’s part, Twitter’s new link shortener will automatically identify when a long link has been posted in a tweet, as in the demo tweet below. The service will then surface a message that reads, “Link will appear shortened,” and the remaining character count will update to reflect that. Once the user publishes the tweet, the link will appear as a shortened version of the original, though in reality it has been assigned a t.co link ID.
Leaving part of the original link intact means users won’t be blindly clicking links that could potentially lead to malicious websites. Businesses and individuals that care about click-through analytics can continue to use whatever third-party link shortening services they want.
Brazilian Portuguese
Twitter.com, mobile.twitter.com and Twitter for Android are all now available in Brazilian Portuguese, the tenth language to be supported on the microblogging site. Support for other mobile applications is coming soon.
A language addition wouldn’t be particularly newsworthy in of itself, but what’s fascinating is that Twitter says the language was only added to its translation center three days ago, making Portuguese the most quickly completed translation project yet. That’s significant because it means that Twitter has some incredibly loyal users, which could make further translation projects a breeze.
New PR
Lynn Fox, who has held several high-profile PR positions at Apple, Google, Palm, Lucasfilm and Ustream, will now serve as director of communications at Twitter under Sean Garret, according to AllThingsD.
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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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