Netvibes is a very popular personalized start page you can use to assemble your favorite web stuff in one customizable spot. Yesterday, the nice folks over at Netvibes included Twitter in their default set of ready-made modules. Head on over to Netvibes.com and click the Twitter link in the lower left-side column -- in about three seconds you'll be receiving and sending Twitters on your new start page. Or, you can just click here.

At some point, Twitter-ers came up with their own method of directing updates to one another using an @ symbol. We started supporting this behavior by doing things like creating the in reply to link, confining the reply messages to friends in the loop, and linking the @username to a profile. Another layer of support to this behavior is a feature we launched tonight which collects updates directed at you—just in case you missed 'em.

The Replies page is where you can go to see all the updates that folks have intentionally Twittered in your general direction. In other words, if somebody Twitters "@biz liking the new Replies tab!" it will get saved at Twitter.com/replies. For more info, check out these support documents Crystal wrote up: What is the Replies tab?, and What does @username do?

Tweetvolume is totally cool. Enter a few words or phrases and see how often they appear on Twitter.

Twitter was invited to be one of the early participants and the new Facebook application platform. Basically, Facebook now allows developers to build applications folks can install and use inside Facebook. It's pretty awesome. So, if you're on Facebook, be sure to install our Twitter application!

The Guardian Technology Blog posted incorrect information about Twitter this morning. The Twitter API respects protected updates and does not have a privacy 'glitch.'

So what the heck are they talking about? Some Twitter users willingly provided their usernames and passwords to a mash-up project called Twittervision (a service unaffiliated with Twitter except that it accesses our API). They did this so they could be part of the fun and access more Twittervision features. However, Twittervision was not checking to see if any of these folks had marked their updates as "protected." Starting today David Troy, the creator of Twittervision, tells us he'll make sure to check for this.

As a reminder, please note that mash-ups and other experimental projects built using the Twitter API are totally awesome and fun but developed by folks outside of Twitter. So, we don't necessarily test them all out. If privacy is a concern, we remind you to refrain from supplying your Twitter username and password to other people, sites, or services. For more information about privacy, please have a look at our Privacy Policy.

Twitter has been nominated by Lovemarks!

I love Twitter! I am not the first person to adopt new technology and didn’t know quite what to think when I was introduced to the product. But I gave it a try and have been pleasantly surprised by its forced simplicity (condense your musing into 140 characters) and the easy way you fall into staying connected with friends - without any overhead! Nothing to customize - you just type. Via the web, IM, your cell phone - so you can always be in touch. Technology has finally achieved something easy and fun. I love it!

—Catherine, United States - 18 May 2007

When aliens are trying to decide if Earthlings are ready for them to make first contact, they no longer have to sneak down here and live among us. They only need to visit Twittervision's new 3D view of what people are Twittering around the world to get a sense of our planet. "Oh look," they'll click to one another in strange alien-speak, "They are still arguing over copyright, of all things. They're not ready."

As much as we'd love to blame yesterday's outage on scaling issues, hardware, exponential growth, rogue bots, aberrant behavior, or even our brief stint on Japanese television last night, we can't. Having achieved a strong position with regard to scaling Twitter, we felt comfortable enough to begin optimizing lots of smaller parts of our application for maximum efficiency. We were so focused on those smaller details that we lost track of the bigger picture and the site was unresponsive for lots of folks throughout the day.

What went wrong? We checked in code to provide more accurate pagination, to better distribute and optimize our messaging system—basically we just kept tweaking when we should have called it a day. Details are great but getting too caught up in them is a mistake. I've been CEO of Twitter for two months now and this an awesome lesson learned. We're seeing the bigger picture and Twitter is back. Please contact us if something isn't working right (with Twitter that is).

We made a few enhancements to m.twitter.com yesterday. Now you can check a box and have the site remember you (so you don't have to sign in again). Also, we now display ten updates on a page instead of five. If things aren't working perfectly on your mobile browser, please do let us know what phone and/or browser you're using when you contact support.

We've had some questions about what Microformats mean for Twitter and developers. As one of your friendly neighborhood Twitter engineers, I'd be happy to explain.

Microformats are a way of marking up HTML to give it enhanced meaning with the aim of representing certain types of information. For example, say you want to mark up a bunch of blog entries on a web page so that either a human or a machine can pick those entries out. There's a Microformats standard called hAtom that does just that, and it's just one of several standards that we've implemented here on Twitter. If you poke around our code you'll see the aforementioned hAtom on pages that show lists of Twitter updates, hCard for the authors of those updates, XFN for friends of users, and more.

What's the point? If you as a developer are more comfortable working with HTML than with our API, it's now easy for you to grab Twitter updates for projects like Greasemonkey scripts, for example. It's all about making it easier to work with the data that Twitter makes available. With the addition of Microformats, all you need to get mashing up Twitter is our site.

Hopefully that clears things up. Please contribute your questions and experience to the Twitter Development Talk group, and tell us about the cool stuff you build!

Here's more information on our recent changes to our international access number for SMS user with special regard to folks in Australia. We use a UK number to support Australia, but our old number did not work for all Australians and some messages were routed in a roundabout way that was inefficient and in some cases more expensive.

So, we got a new UK number that works for everyone in Australia. In order to switch numbers, we had to do some development work. If for some reason you're an Australian Twitter-er and you're not happy or having difficulty with our SMS feature, please do let us know.

Mobile Site Thanks to xhtml-mp developer, Heidi Pollock and our very own Britt Selvitelle Twitter now has a mobile site at m.twitter.com.

Jobs Twitter Inc is hiring

New International Support +447624801423 is our new UK longcode. With this new number, Australia is once again fully supported over SMS. Thanks for your patience, mates!

New Feature: Block We've introduced a new feature lots of folks requested called "block." Blocking someone means that you (and your pic) will not appear on the blocked person's friends list, profile page, friends timeline, badge, or anywhere else.

Geeking Out Twitter now fully supports microformats.

If you are a Canadian Twitter-er then we've got a special short code for you to use with Twitter.
Updates from folks you are following will come from 21212 and that's the number you should send your updates too as well. (The US shortcode is still 40404.)