Happy Birthday Twitter!


It's easy to remember working with @jack, @ev, and our tiny team on a project we called Twitter like it was last week. Amazingly, it's five years ago today that the first tweet was sent. Over these years, Twitter has matured and made an impact in the areas of social responsibility, politics, sports, media, and more. The people who use Twitter have made it what it is today, and on our fifth birthday, it's the people that make Twitter special who we are celebrating.

There are now more than 400 full time employees working at Twitter. In the last year alone we have made huge progress towards stability and performance. This work sets us up to continue innovating but it also allows us to build a profitable business on a strong foundation. We are in a position now which allows us to continue serving and delighting everyone who relies on Twitter to connect them to that which is meaningful for another five years and beyond.

Twitter users now send more than 140 million Tweets a day which adds up to a billion Tweets every 8 days—by comparison, it took 3 years, 2 months, and 1 day to reach the first billion Tweets. While it took about 18 months to sign up the first 500,000 accounts, we now see close to 500,000 accounts created every day. All of this momentum and growth often pales in comparison to a single compassionate Tweet by a caring person who wants to help someone in need.

The people who use Twitter make it special because for any interest we might have, somebody is tweeting about it. We're lucky to have so many people using Twitter in so many interesting and important ways. This month, I celebrated my own birthday. It's a gift to be able to work with some of the most talented, thoughtful, and smart people I've ever known. It's because of them that my life has been made better. Happy Birthday, Twitter—and thank you.

The Tweets Must Flow

Our goal is to instantly connect people everywhere to what is most meaningful to them. For this to happen, freedom of expression is essential. Some Tweets may facilitate positive change in a repressed country, some make us laugh, some make us think, some downright anger a vast majority of users. We don't always agree with the things people choose to tweet, but we keep the information flowing irrespective of any view we may have about the content.

The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact. This is both a practical and ethical belief. On a practical level, we simply cannot review all one hundred million-plus Tweets created and subsequently delivered every day. From an ethical perspective, almost every country in the world agrees that freedom of expression is a human right. Many countries also agree that freedom of expression carries with it responsibilities and has limits.

At Twitter, we have identified our own responsibilities and limits. There are Tweets that we do remove, such as illegal Tweets and spam. However, we make efforts to keep these exceptions narrow so they may serve to prove a broader and more important rule—we strive not to remove Tweets on the basis of their content. For more on what we allow and what we don’t, please see this help page.

Our position on freedom of expression carries with it a mandate to protect our users' right to speak freely and preserve their ability to contest having their private information revealed. While we may need to release information as required by law, we try to notify Twitter users before handing over their information whenever we can so they have a fair chance to fight the request if they so choose.

We continue to work towards further transparency when we remove Tweets for legal reasons. We submit all copyright removal notices to @chillingeffects and they are now Tweeting them from @ChillFirehose. We will continue to increase our transparency in this area and encourage you to let us know if you think we have not met our aspirations with regard to your freedom of expression.

Discussion on topics from geopolitical events to wardrobe malfunctions make Twitter both important and fun. Providing the tools that foster these discussions and following the policies that keep them alive is meaningful work for us. If you are interested in this topic, we encourage you to follow the accounts collected @twitter/freedom-of-expression or better yet, come work with us.

Co-written by @biz and @amac.

From Russia with Love

We may be a relatively small company of about two hundred employees but we have a global mindset. Twitter is growing very fast internationally these days. In fact, about sixty percent of our usage is outside of the United States. That's why we are honored today that President Medvedev of Russia stopped by our office for a brief tour and his inaugural Tweet.

It was incredibly generous of the President to stop by with such a busy schedule. Recognizing the power of new technology and learning to leverage it to advance humanity in positive and meaningful ways is a powerful display of leadership. It was a great chance for us to share our passionate belief that the open exchange of information can have a positive global impact.

Mr. President, welcome to San Francisco and Silicon Valley!

Twitter for iPhone

Comprehensive analysis of the Twitter user experience in the iTunes App Store showed very plainly that people were looking for an app from Twitter—we didn't have one so they generally got confused and gave up. Obviously, we saw room for improvement. Starting today, Twitter for iPhone and iPod touch is available for free on the iTunes App Store. Loren, Leland, and the rest of the Mobile team have artfully crafted an application that takes the Twitter experience to a whole new level of awesomeness. We hope you'll love it like we do.

Something worth noting is that you don't need a Twitter account to enjoy this application. Browsing trends, reading Top Tweets, finding popular users, and checking out public tweets geographically nearby are all possible immediately upon download. Discovery and consumption of interesting, relevant information is a central focus. However, quick and easy signup exists within the application so new users won't need to visit our web site to create an account. Oh, and 日本語版Twitter for iPhoneを公開してます...With more languages on the way!











Download Twitter for iPhone on the iTunes App Store today.

News for Developers

If you're a Twitter developer, then we invite you to read our engineering blog regularly. Even if you're on the mailing lists and IRC, or already following @twitterapi, the eng blog is a good resource. On Wednesday, Raffi blogged about changes that impact developers regarding requirements around authentication. This is the kind of information anyone working on the Twitter platform is going to want to know. If you get a chance, check it out.

Tweets vs Mosquitos: Let’s #endmalaria

Malaria threatens one half of the world's population, resulting in 350 million cases each year and nearly one million deaths on an annual basis—many of them children. World Malaria day is this Sunday, and the impact of organizations devoted to the cause has already begun. In partnership with Malaria No More and The Case Foundation, Twitter is offering a way to help put an end to this disease. You can help starting today with just one tweet.

A worker in Tanzania inspects mosquito nets before delivery.

When you send a tweet about Malaria and pledge your donation of $10, you are providing a life-saving bed net to protect against this mosquito-borne infections disease. Your generous donation will be matched by The Case Foundation, providing the opportunity to double the impact of each tweet. For more information about Twitter and the fight against Malaria, visit our Hope140 site dedicated to helping all of us become a force for good.

It’s Alive!

Last month we previewed an incredibly simple set of web tools which enable partner websites to easily integrate Twitter functionality into their site experience called @anywhere. The idea is that web users will be able to engage with existing Twitter features from all of their favorite sites. Today, we're happy to announce this service is live and ready for anyone who wants to build a little Twitter into their online experience.

Our friends at Foursquare call @anywhere "aggressively simple." Other partners like Amazon are excited that customers can "conveniently follow suggested Twitter accounts without ever leaving" the shopping experience. Bing implements the new tools so users can "seamlessly interact with Twitter." HuffPo already went all-out and built a Twitter edition and the WSJ.com told us, they hope @anywhere "will help us connect readers with the broader story."

Citysearch says that @anywhere "will help our users get a complete real-time snapshot of a merchant and, when they'd like, engage that merchant via Twitter directly from our site. And, in the UK, The Guardian is using @anywhere to innovatively connect readers with those running for public office: "Now, from within our pages you can ask questions your prospective parliamentary candidates and of our journalists. This is a clear indication of how we're trying to lower barriers between our audience and those who hold power or seek to hold office, and between our readers and our journalists."

The full list of sites who have been working on @anywhere implementations pre-public launch include AdAge, Amazon, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, Disqus, eBay, Foursquare, Gawker, Google, Gowalla, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Hunch, Mashable, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, WSJ.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube.

We'll soon be highlighting their integrations here and at media.twitter.com. Let's see what you can do with @anywhere. We can't wait.
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