We posted last Friday about the Tweets-per-second (TPS) counts we saw during the first week of the World Cup and the record TPS seen at the end of the NBA Championship game. The second week of the World Cup continued to see consistent spikes in TPS after goals that are remarkable increases over our average of 750 TPS. However, we caution to call any goals a record this week both because many of the games were played simultaneously with another one and total numbers were fairly similar to the first week when only one game was being played at a time.

However, we are calling the end of Japan's 3-1 victory over Denmark a record that bests the end of the Los Angeles Laker victory over the Boston Celtics (3,085 TPS). When the referee blew the final whistle, we saw 3,283 TPS. (The Netherlands/Cameroon game ended six minutes earlier.)

Early in 2009, when Twitter employed less than 50 people, we faced two different security incidents that impacted a small number of users. Put simply, we were the victim of an attack and user accounts were improperly accessed. There were 45 accounts accessed in a January incident and 10 that April for short periods of time. In the first incident, unauthorized joke tweets were made from nine accounts and attackers may have accessed nonpublic information such as email addresses and mobile phone numbers. In the second, nonpublic information was accessible and at least one user’s password was reset.

Within hours of the January breach, we closed the security hole and notified affected account holders. We posted a blog post about it on the same day. In the April incident, within less than 18 minutes of the hack we removed administrative access to the hacker and we quickly notified affected users. We also posted this blog item about the incident within a few days of first learning about it.

Why are we bringing up these incidents from 18 and 14 months ago that we already told people about? Because the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched an inquiry into our security practices related to these attacks and today announced that we've reached an agreement that resolves their concerns. Even before the agreement, we'd implemented many of the FTC's suggestions and the agreement formalizes our commitment to those security practices.

Updated at 3:15pm.

Many Twitter users follow their favorite celebrities, sports heroes, or brands. They often find and follow even more nearby businesses or experts in their industry. And, of course, people also follow friends, family and associates so that they can keep updated on what's happening with them. In fact, one of our most frequent requests from users is how they can find and follow the people they are connected to on their social networks.

Today, we're improving our Find Friends section to make it easier to find and follow the people you already know -- your friends on Facebook and connections on LinkedIn -- who use Twitter. Our Facebook app, which launched in 2007, now shows which of your Facebook friends are on Twitter and lets you follow them instantly and save them to a list. The app also lets you post your Tweets to your Facebook profile and now, to one of your Facebook pages too. With the Tweets application by LinkedIn, you can see which of your LinkedIn connections are on Twitter and follow the ones you choose right from the app. The app also lets you save your LinkedIn connections as a list, post your Tweets to LinkedIn, and add your Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile.

UPDATE: The Facebook app cannot currently access your Facebook friend list. We believe this is an issue on Facebook's end.

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!

It's been an eventful week for World Cup fans around the globe. Many have taken to Twitter in record numbers to tweet about coaching decisions, referee calls and, of course, goals.

In this spirit, we thought it would be fun (and instructive) to track the top three most tweeted goals of the tournament so far. These goals had the highest Tweets-per-second (TPS) count in the 30 seconds after a goal was scored.

The most tweeted goals of the past week...

1) Japan scores against Cameroon on June 14 in their 1-0 victory (2,940 TPS)
2) Brazil scores their first goal against North Korea in their 2-1 June 14 victory (2,928 TPS)
3) Mexico ties South Africa in their June 11 game (2,704 TPS)

Were these all-time Twitter records? Yes, but only until last night's deciding game of the NBA Championship between the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics. The Lakers' victory generated a record 3,085 TPS as the game ended.

For context, Twitter currently sees about 750 TPS on an average day and 65 million total Tweets a day.

The Platform team is always excited to see developers' creativity in building cool applications using our APIs. To showcase new and interesting applications built on the Twitter Platform, we're going to periodically feature great apps on our blog. For our first post, we'd like to highlight the @kosmix TweetBeat World Cup site. For all of the World Cup fans out there, you are seriously missing out if you haven't checked this out yet!



The TweetBeat site provides real-time updates from and around the World Cup. You can follow what is being said about the whole tournament, or focus on a specific team and even follow what's happening with its opposition. Not only that, but their Popular Tweets sidebar keeps you informed of what everyone else is talking about and, during matches, which team has the most Tweets.

TweetBeat uses the Twitter Firehose to cluster similar tweets into real-time stories from all across Twitter as they happen. You can use the speed slider to slow down or speed up the flow of Tweets and stories down the page. They have also integrated @Anywhere so that you can retweet the best tweets or follow your favorite Twitter users right from the site, without having to come back to twitter.com.



If you know of other cool uses of the Twitter API, tweet about it and mention @twitterapi or me (@themattharris) and we'll check it out!

From a site stability and service outage perspective, it's been Twitter's worst month since last October.

What's the problem?
Last Friday, we detailed on our Engineering blog that this is going to be a rocky few weeks. We're working through tweaks to our system in order to provide greater stability at a time when we're facing record traffic. We have long-term solutions that we are working towards, but in the meantime, we are making real-time adjustments so that we can grow our capacity and avoid outages during the World Cup.

As we go through this process, we have uncovered unexpected deeper issues and have even caused inadvertent downtime as a result of our attempts to make changes. Ultimately, the changes that we are making now will make Twitter much more reliable in the future. However, we certainly are not happy about the disruptions that we have faced and even caused this week and understand how they negatively impact our users.

Should Twitter have been ready?
Record traffic and unprecedented spikes in activity are never simple to manage. However, we were well aware of the likely impact of the World Cup. What we didn't anticipate was some of the complexities that have been inherent in fixing and optimizing our systems before and during the event.

What's next?
Over the next two weeks, we may perform relatively short planned maintenance on the site. During this time, the service will likely be taken down. We will not perform this work during World Cup games, and we will provide advance notification.

How can I best keep informed of any future Twitter site issues?
For real-time updates on site outages or major issues, you can go to our Status blog. For most other problems that you may be having with Twitter, follow @Support.

Background on Twitter uptime from Pingdom
A month by month look: http://bit.ly/c3BPRS

If you're like everyone at the Twitter office, you're going crazy about the World Cup. When turning to Twitter to keep up with the current game, it helps to know where a Tweet is coming from—is that person watching the game on TV or is he actually in the stadium? To help answer that question, we're excited to announce Twitter Places on twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com. Starting today, you can tag Tweets with specific places, including all World Cup stadiums in South Africa, and create new Twitter Places. You can also click a Twitter Place within a Tweet to see recent Tweets from a particular location. Try it out during the next match—you will be able to see Tweets coming from the stadium.
Several other features of this launch include: 

• Foursquare and Gowalla integration: Many Foursquare and Gowalla users publish check-ins to Twitter. Location is a key component of these Tweets, so we worked closely with both companies to associate a Twitter Place with Tweets generated by these services. This means that if you click on a Twitter Place, such as "Ritual Roasters," you will see standard Tweets and check-ins from Foursquare and Gowalla.
• API: We are releasing API functionality that lets developers integrate Twitter Places into their applications. 
• Support for more browsers: Now, you can add location to your Tweets from any browser—Safari and Internet Explorer, in addition to Chrome or Firefox. 

The majority of Tweets are sent or read on applications built by the developer community. Likewise, there is a ever-growing number of third-party applications that bring value to users in a variety of new ways. As we notified developers in April, on June 30th we're changing the way that all Twitter applications interact with our platform by requiring the use of OAuth for authenticated access. OAuth is a technology that enables applications to access the Twitter platform on your behalf without ever asking you directly for your password. For users, this means increased usability, security, and accountability for the applications that you use every day. Many developers have already switched their applications over to use OAuth, and we're here to help for those who haven't. If you are a developer and still need to make this necessary change, you can read more about the OAuth transition and the resources available to you on the Twitter developers website.

The first World Cup took place in 1930 and it has since grown to become an epic global event celebrating diversity and inspiring us to overcome adversity. More importantly, nations and people around the world have the opportunity to connect around something profoundly simple: play! The mission driving FIFA, the governing body behind the World Cup, is to "Develop the game, touch the world, and build a better future." Good stuff.

The Republic of South Africa will host representatives from thirty two nations as they compete for the ultimate international championship. This will be the most widely-viewed sporting event in the world. Twitter's rapid international growth means we are part of this global phenomenon as people everywhere seek to discover what's happening with their favorite team, their favorite players, and breaking news related to this worldwide event.

Using live widgets, real-time search, and Top Tweets (updates that are currently catching the attention of many Twitter users) we've put together a special site to capture the spirit of the World Cup and it's already pulsing with activity. Fans have a unique opportunity to connect with players, teams, and brands using Twitter to join the matches in a new way. We also are providing a list of suggested accounts to follow during the tournament and a World Cup theme for your profile page. We'll leave it up to you to learn how to do the neat little trick we're calling hashflags.

Every day millions of people use Twitter to create, share and discover information, and as we grow, analytics becomes an increasingly crucial part of improving our service.

Up until about a year ago, we used an online database called Dabble DB to track and share information about our projects internally. While we've since moved that project management tool in-house, we maintain a relationship with Dabble DB's creators, Smallthought Systems. When Smallthought launched Trendly, a tool that helps web sites distinguish signal from noise in their Google Analytics data, we were among the first to try it. And, as Twitter is the world's largest Ruby on Rails-based web service, we are impressed with their frequent contributions to the Ruby and Smalltalk development communities. Their team has a unique combination of entrepreneurship, creativity, and analytics expertise.

Therefore, it is with great pleasure that we announce the acquisition of Smallthought Systems. They have joined our analytics team and will focus on integrating ideas from Trendly into our current tools and building innovative realtime products for our future commercial partners. Please join us in welcoming Avi Bryant, Andrew Catton, Ben Matasar, and Luke Andrews to Twitter.

Since early March, we have been routing links within Direct Messages through our link service to detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of malware, phishing, and other dangers. Any link shared in a Direct Message has been wrapped with a twt.tl URL. Links reported to us as malicious are blacklisted, and we present users with a page that warns them of potentially malicious content if they click blacklisted links. We want users to have this benefit on all tweets.

Additionally, as we mentioned at our Chirp developer conference in April, if you want to share a link through Twitter, there currently isn't a way to automatically shorten it and we want to fix this. It should be easy for people to share shortened links from the Tweet box on Twitter.com.

To meet both of these goals, we're taking small steps to expand the link service currently available in Direct Messages to links shared through all Tweets. We're testing this link service now with a few Twitter employee accounts.

User Experience, Safety, and Value

When this is rolled out more broadly to users this summer, all links shared on Twitter.com or third-party apps will be wrapped with a t.co URL. A really long link such as http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 might be wrapped as http://t.co/DRo0trj for display on SMS, but it could be displayed to web or application users as amazon.com/Delivering- or as the whole URL or page title. Ultimately, we want to display links in a way that removes the obscurity of shortened link and lets you know where a link will take you.

In addition to a better user experience and increased safety, routing links through this service will eventually contribute to the metrics behind our Promoted Tweets platform and provide an important quality signal for our Resonance algorithm—the way we determine if a Tweet is relevant and interesting to users. We are also looking to provide services that make use of this data, an example would be analytics within our eventual commercial accounts service.

Early Developer Preview Comes First

As a first step, developers who create applications on the Twitter platform can now begin to prepare for this service. They will be able to choose how to display the wrapped links in a manner that is most useful, informative and appropriate for a given device or application. Our first step is a small one. We're rolling out wrapped links on a handful of accounts, including @TwitterAPI, @rsarver, and @raffi, to help developers test their code. Ultimately, every link on Twitter will be wrapped.

If you are already partial to a particular shortener when you tweet, you can continue to use it for link shortening and analytics as you normally would, and we'll wrap the shortened links you submit.

We’d like to thank our friends at .CO Internet SAS, the registry for the new .CO extension, for helping us secure t.co for use with this service. Links shared on Twitter will be safer, clearer, and more valuable.