Twitter Updates

By
Wednesday, 11 October 2006

In case you’re not subscribed to receive Twitter email from us from time to time, here’s the text of an email I sent out earlier today.

There have been some updates in the world of Twitter that we wanted to let you know about. Some of them are geeky, some of them are funny, and at least one of them is straight-up useful. If you haven’t been around in a while, come visit Twitter and see what your friends are doing.

RSS Feeds for Public Timelines

File this one in the geeky category if you like but now you can follow your favorite public Twitter folks in your favorite RSS reader application. By the way, if you’re not sure what that is, give Google Reader a try — it’s free and works great (http://google.com/reader). The Twitter Public Timeline has a feed to but that can get overwhelming. Also, there’s Atom feeds too in case you’re wondering.

Permalinks or Post Pages

Now every time you make a Twitter update whether it’s while you’re out and about with your mobile phone or on the web at our site that update gets saved in your timeline and gets to live on it’s very own page. To see the page, click on the blue links after your updates that say about when you made the update.

We made these pages so bloggers and link collectors can point to a specific post in time. Sometimes posts are really funny or memorable. There’s this one post by courtneyp about a hash brown patty stuck in a bus window that had me cracking up I’m not sure why but it just struck me as oddly funny.

There have also been wedding engagements, car crashes (nobody hurt!), and oddly lots of Twitter users going on parachuting adventures. Sometimes you want to revisit or remember these moments and these pages really do the trick.

The Twitter API

Now for the really geeky update — we have released an Application Program Interface for developers. This means we’ve exposed some of the inner workings of Twitter so engineers who want to creatively extend our functionality can do so. We were happilly surprised at how quickly some really neat projects emerged.

Mo.ist
Celly
Twittermap
iChat

That’s about it for now. We’re busy on some big improvements and feature updates but those will have to wait until next time.