As planned since Monday, representatives from Facebook, Twitter and RIM met with the Home Office in the UK on Thursday to discuss the role of social media and mobile messaging in the chaotic riots that raged across London earlier this month. Freedom of speech is safe for now: as it turns out, the conversations ended up being more about keeping crime off social media as opposed to creating new restrictions.
Home Secretary Theresa May chaired the meeting, which was also attended by Minister of State Jeremy Browne, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) and the police.
(For oblivious Americans like myself, the Home Office is a governmental department in the UK charged with a wide range of responsibilities, from immigration to drugs policy to counter-terrorism, safety and beyond.)
Considering the participants in Thursday’s “social media meeting,” as they’re calling it, it’s not too surprising that restricting communication over social and mobile services wasn’t the focus of talks. After all, it was Prime Minister David Cameron who last week suggested that stemming communication might be a last resort for police and intelligence services, much to the chagrin of free speech defenders.
But Cameron wasn’t a part of the meeting.
“We found today's discussion at the Home Office constructive and built on much of the work we are already doing with the UK authorities to ensure Facebook remains one of the safest places on the internet,” said a Facebook spokesperson. “We welcome the fact that this was a dialogue about working together to keep people safe rather than about imposing new restrictions on internet services.”
Based on a message from Facebook’s PR, it appears that the company had a lot of time to express how much it was doing to keep users safe and to axe any criminal activity taking place on the social network.
RIM echoed Facebook's statement. As for Twitter, we have yet to hear their perspective.
'The discussions,” said a Home Office spokesperson, “looked at how law enforcement and the networks can build on the existing relationships and cooperation to crack down on the networks being used for criminal behaviour.”
Whether that means police organizations in the UK have any plans of using social media to their advantage, as has been done in units around the US (with a recent example in New York), remains to be seen. We’ve reached out to the Home Office to see if they have a comment on this.
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Startup/Business
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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.
