Development on Twitter’s mobile apps has been speeding right along lately.
Twitter for BlackBerry v1.1 just launched with updates for location, push notifications and much more that bring it up to speed with official offerings on iOS and Android.
Here’s a list of the biggest updates:
Location. As simple as it sounds: you can now add your geolocation to every tweet. This has been a basic feature on Twitter.com and most mobile apps for awhile now, so it’s good that Twitter for BlackBerry finally got it.
Push @mentions. This one has also been a long time coming. If somebody mentions you in a tweet, the app immediately pushes a notification to your phone
Chat-style messages. Like the rebranding listed below, “Direct Messages” have been renamed “Messages” to align with Twitter.com. The chat interface has also been updated to feel more like a chat experience.
#Topic autocomplete. After typing in a hash symbol (#), the app will now suggest hashtags based on hashtags previously seen in tweets, retweets, searches or elsewhere.
Refreshed branding. Graphics in the app have been updated to “reflect the new look of the Twitter brand” and layout of icons on the home screen have been streamlined.
Retweet updates. When you retweet someone’s post, it will instantly appear in your timeline as “Retweeted by You,” a nice visual confirmation that the retweet worked.
Language support. Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Polish, Czech and Thai have all been added as supported languages.
This latest upgrade for BlackBerry follows a slightly dramatic uproar in the Twitterverse over the QuickBar, introduced in Twitter’s latest update to its iOS apps as a means of displaying trending topics and Promoted Trends. Lovingly nicknamed the #DickBar, the bar was removed less than a month after its original release and just a day after Jack Dorsey’s return to Twitter as head of product.
Twitter for Android was last updated in February with a few minor fixes.
Looming over all these updates now are reports that UberMedia, developer of several mobile Twitter applications, has plans to build its own microblogging service. In the interim, Twitter would do well to snatch as many users from third party clients as it can.
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Startup/Business
Joined Vator on
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.
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.
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.
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.
