My name is Nick Kallen (@nk) and I'm the project lead on Lists, a new feature we're testing with a small subset of users. The idea is to allow people to curate lists of Twitter accounts. For example, you could create a list of the funniest Twitter accounts of all time, athletes, local businesses, friends, or any compilation that makes sense.

Lists are public by default (but can be made private) and the lists you've created are linked from your profile. Other Twitter users can then subscribe to your lists. This means lists have the potential to be an important new discovery mechanism for great tweets and accounts.

We started working on this feature because of the frequent requests we received from people who were looking for a better way to organize information on Twitter. Of course, that means not just twitter.com—the Platform team will follow up in a few days with information on the Lists API. This will allow developers to add support for Lists into your favorite Twitter apps.

We're just doing limited testing for now. But once we've tested the feature out a bit, we'll launch it for all accounts!

Thanks to @rael, @vl and the rest of the team who worked to get this limited release out today.

There's a lot of talk today about our financing. Yesterday we closed a significant round of funding with a group of investment firms that we're excited to publicly thank: Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Morgan Stanley.

It was important to us that we find investment partners who share our vision for building a company of enduring value. Twitter's journey has just begun and we are committed to building the best product, technology, and company possible. I'm proud of the team we've built so far and I'm confident in the future we'll build together.

Like we said earlier today, people should read or write tweets wherever they prefer and there's a large portion of Internet users who prefer AOL. As a proud partner in AOL Lifestream, Twitter will be smoothly integrated into AIM, Bebo, and AOL.com. Some of your other favorite services like YouTube, Flickr, Digg, and Facebook are also part of the action. Did I mention that our Platform team has working overtime lately? We love those guys!

There are tens of thousands of mobile, desktop, and web applications creating a variety of ways to interact with Twitter on your favorite device or service. We think people should read or write tweets wherever they prefer so we work with social networks, mobile networks, television networks, and search engines to make that happen. This week, fans of MySpace have started taking their @usernames with them by syncing their accounts with Twitter.

When you sync your MySpace account with Twitter, you'll be able to update your status as you normally would from your home page, status and mood page, or mobile phone. When you update your status on MySpace it will also update Twitter—and, the reverse is true. We're already seeing many accounts syncing up and we expect more to follow. Kudos to Ryan Sarver and the Twitter platform team for helping to get this worked out with our friends at MySpace.

If you like using Twitter.com as your Twitter client, then you might be interested to know that we've added four more themes to the design collection. We've also updated the default theme and avatar to match our front page. If you prefer the classic default theme, it's still there and you can change it back. To change your Twitter page design, visit Settings > Design.

At the start, critics often said, "Twitter is fun, but it's not useful." At one point @ev responded dryly with, "Neither is ice cream." Things have come a long way in a short time. We recognized potential early but users and platform developers would demonstrate how much more Twitter could be. Fostering an open and increasingly important network is not as easily dismissed as it once was—but it's still fun!

Now that we know more about how Twitter is being used, we've made changes to our Terms of Service—these are the basic rules that go along with using Twitter. The revisions more appropriately reflect the nature of Twitter and convey key issues such as ownership. For example, your tweets belong to you, not to Twitter. With these revisions, we expect some discussion so here are a few highlights from the updated page.

Advertising—In the Terms, we leave the door open for advertising. We'd like to keep our options open as we've said before.

Ownership—Twitter is allowed to "use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute" your tweets because that's what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you.

APIs—The apps that have grown around the Twitter platform are flourishing and adding value to the ecosystem. You authorize us to make content available via our APIs. We're also working on guidelines for use of the API.

SPAM—Abusive behavior and spam is also outlined in these terms according to the rules we've been operating under for some time.

These updates complement the spirit of Twitter. If we've left something out, or the nature of the service changes, then we'll revisit the Terms—there's a feedback link on the page. We're in the process of sending an email about the revisions now. It's important that everyone who tweets, develops apps, or is simply interested in Twitter understands that it's not about the technology, it's about how we all use the service that matters most.