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FBI Arrests Oklahoma Teabagger For Twitter Threats

Eric — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 23:44:34 +0000

A Twitter user who made threats last week that he would turn a peaceful demonstration violent was arrested on the 15th. The FBI arrested CitizenQuasar better known as Daniel Knight Hayden making him likely the first Twitter user involved in criminal prosecution as a result of Twitter activity. (via wired)

Backlash As Oprah Joins Twitter

Eric — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 14:31:59 +0000

Users blamed Oprah’s popularity for causing the site to slow down when she issued her first tweet. Estimates are that perhaps over a million new users joined the site after Oprah discussed it on her talk show. A million users is nothing more than a guess and a very rough one at that. The estimate is based on a Twitter ID pre-Oprah and one post-Oprah. When compared there is about a difference of 1.2 million, which logically would mean 1.2 million people joined the site during that time period. The problem though is Twitter no longer sequentially assigns user IDs so it really is a guessing game when it comes to how much user growth Twitter experienced during that time period.

Kutcher Becomes Twitter Millionaire

Eric — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 14:19:17 +0000

Kutcher pledged to donate 10,000 mosquito nets to the charity Malaria No More if he won, which he did. EA stepped up and added that Kutcher’s millionth follower would get a role in their next Sims release.

Twitter Traffic Explodes!

Eric — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:59:04 +0000

I wrote briefly about how a majority of the Twitter user base is working adults. Comscore took a closer look at the numbers and offers their thoughts on who is actually powering Twitter adoption. They should also have their own US traffic numbers sometime next week.

Flutter: The New Twitter

Eric — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 18:43:58 +0000

Twitter has been getting poked fun of left and right lately it seems.

Twitter Pro Invites Going Fast

Eric — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 01:23:17 +0000

You knew it was coming, 140 characters is so limiting. Say hello to 160 character goodness, those extra 20 characters never felt so good! Best of all it is free if you are quick enough to get an invite.

Is Twitter Turning Into MySpace?

Eric — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 01:18:25 +0000

TechCrunch has a nice guest post from Mrinal Desai on the transformation of Twitter in recent months. The article brings up some valid points which once you think about it are the very same things we saw early on with MySpace, craze for friends (followers), adoption by celebrities and the growth of fake accounts.

Twitpic Adds Capacity And Releases New Design

Eric — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 13:28:17 +0000

Twitpic is adding a huge amount of capacity in order to keep up with the sites current demand according to the Twitpic blog.

This is the first big step in making Twitpic more reliable. This move will put Twitpic on its new hardware platform with over 3 times it’s current capacity…basically we bought more hamsters and put them in bigger wheels and gave them red bull (which is illegal in 48 states, but I know someone in government and they owed me a favor so its cool).

A new sexier & younger looking…uhhhh…*cough* a NEW layout for Twitpic will also be released tonight, below is a preview:

As of the time of this post the upgrade is mostly complete but certain site features such as commenting are currently disabled.

Update On Twitter Site Reliability

Eric — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 02:58:23 +0000

Twitter posted an update recently on the Twitter Status blog indicating they’ve almost squashed all the bugs that have impacted site performance recently.

The site has been sluggish the past couple days, but we’ve been making good progress on some of the more serious bugs.

We’ve largely resolved the database inconsistency issues that were responsible for a wide range of problems. These include: fluctuating direct message counts and missing updates. Some older updates (from before 3/25) may still not have reappeared. But new updates should no longer be missing.

Some improvements to follow/unfollow. There are still folks running into problems trying to follow or unfollow users. However, the inconsistencies related to this have improved some and we have more improvements on the way. The biggest issue right now is the latency people encounter when trying to follow; we’re working to resolve that.

Image uploading for avatars and background images should be much improved

Users with bounced email addresses can now have us try to send mail again (rather than having to write in). And we’ve resolved a deliverability problem we were having with Hotmail.

There’s still a lot of people running into trouble because of the site slowness. And slowness, itself, is a problem. We’re working hard on these issues and will post more as we make progress.

Twitter Most Popular Among Working Adults

Eric — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 01:44:09 +0000

Nielsen recently released statistics that show Twitter is extremely popular among adults. The recent study found that only 3 million of Twitter’s users are under 35, while adults aged 35-49 make up a staggering 42% (or about 3 million accounts) of Twitter’s user base. Additionally 1.5 million accounts are in use by those 55 or older. (via Nielsen)