A quick look at the newest trends on Twitter this morning.

• Rosh Hashanah is trending on Twitter as folks reflect back on the year in 140 characters or less—shofar sho good?
• Iron Man was released today on DVD and Blu Ray and Twitter is teeming with plans to watch it at home tonight.
• #atlgas is still trending as people in Atlanta work together on Twitter to find gas during the shortage affecting the area.

Obama, Sarah Palin, Bailout, Congress, and Wall Street remain top of mind as Twitter-ers share opinions and ideas about this election and the crazy roller coaster ride that is our economy.

This graph illustrates tweet volume for specific terms mentioned during the course of last week's presidential debate. For example, how many updates per minute contained the word "Iran." Of the terms in this graph, the most twittered word in a one minute time span was "Iraq" at nearly 300 just after McCain's assertion that Obama did not visit the area for 900 days. We've annotated a few of the spikes with what the candidates were saying at the time. For more election related information, visit Twitter Election 2008.

A Monday morning roundup of what we're all thinking about this morning on Twitter.

• Wachovia has rocketed to the top trend as folks twitter nervously regarding news of its acquisition by Citi Group.
• #atlgas is trending because people in Atlanta, Georgia have devised a clever way to help each other find gas during a sudden shortage.
• TinaFey has everyone a-twitter yet again as folks praise her spot on satire of vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin.
• VoteForTheMILF.com has hit trend paydirt as folks draw conclusions based on the fact that it redirects to johnmccain.com.

Sarah Palin, Bailout, SNL, and Citigroup are also trending as the economy and this election continue to dominate our collective consciousness.

Update

Dow and #bailout have climbed to top spots on the trends as folks react to the House's rejection of the financial bailout package.

Here's a quick look at today's trending topics.

• WaMu is today's top trend as folks with accounts share their anxiety, twitter about the takeover, and wonder what's next.
• ACL is picking up as people gear up for the Austin City Limits music festival (and watch workers swap the WaMu sign for Chase.)
• Miss Teen USA trends as people pass around a link to the YouTube video mashup of a teen pageant with Palin voiceover.
• USC has folks a-twitter as football fans lament or celebrate Oregon State University's triumph over USC.
• #churchtechcamp has made it to the trend board as folks in Los Angeles gather to explore the intersection of faith and tech.

For trending topics and opinions specifically related to the US presidential election, visit Twitter Election 2008.

Politweets was one of the first to mix Twitter and politics. Other interesting mash-ups were created by C-SPAN for both the RNC and the DNC. There's also the amazingly cool Perspctv and of course there's Current TV's plan to Hack The Debate. Today, we're adding to the mix by launching Twitter Election 2008 built upon our search and trending functionality.


What Do We Think?

Every second of every day, people all around the world share the answer to a simple question, "What are you doing?" With only 140 characters to work with, folks tend to share the reactions, opinions, and ideas foremost in their thoughts. This public chorus reveals what is truly on our minds—Election 2008 on Twitter exposes these topics.

During the first presidential debate in Oxford, Mississippi and each subsequent debate leading up to and beyond election day, Twitter will be performing real-time algorithmic analysis on millions of unedited public reactions. These trending topics along with a live ticker of continuously fresh opinions are available now at election.twitter.com.

What Do You Think?

In addition to exposing emerging political topics, Twitter E08 invites visitors to include their opinions and reactions in 140 characters or less. Twitter is the pulse of what is happening with the people, organizations, and events you care about—delivered immediately, wherever you are. Proven compelling during shared events ranging from earthquakes to film festivals, Twitter now introduces an engaging new way to participate in democracy.

Twitter E08 Features

• Hot Election Topics are determined by a variety of search queries
  
• The topics at the top of the page are updated every 15 minutes
• Clicking at topic filters the content based on that particular word or phrase
  
• Obama and McCain's Twitter accounts are updated whenever they update
• People can participate in the box under "What do you think?"
• The main timeline is a live ticker—new updates appear every second or so
  
• Clicking the sidebar tabs filters the main timeline by candidate name
• We'll be featuring notable Twitter accounts in the sidebar
• Updates made at Twitter E08 will link back to election.twitter.com
  

Note: A Twitter account is not required unless you want to participate by adding your own opinions, thoughts, or ideas. Which you should! Also, send your thoughts via SMS on your mobile while you're watching the debates—that'll work too. What do you think?

Our daily pre-noon roundup of current Twitter trends.

• Palin has folks a-twitter since her spontaneous press availability this morning and her chat with reporters at Ground Zero.
• Jack Thompson is stirring things up again this time on Twitter as folks react to his permanent disbarment with a collective w00t.
• Obama is picking up tweets today as people wonder aloud whether he will take the television time allotted for the debate for himself.
• Congress and Wall Street are back on Twitter as folks tweet nervously about the recent agreement regarding the bailouts.
• #cdninst has made its way onto the trends list today as folks apparently gather in Canada to discuss software of various sorts and kinds.
• John McCain is all over the place on Twitter since announcing that he's suspending his campaign and canceling on Letterman.
• Y Combinator's newest graduate, a link-sharing service called SocialBrowse is building interest as folks react to its public launch.
• Twestival was trending earlier as folks in London geared up for "a tweet-up with a social conscience" going on now.

Here's quick look at today's fresh trends as of about 11am PST.

• Clay Aiken started trending yesterday and he's topping the charts today—his official coming out has people Twittering in ironic shock.
• Matt Millen is stepping down from his role as vice president of the Detroit Lions causing many virtual high-fives in the form of tweets.
• PETA is getting attention as folks react strongly to the suggestion that Ben and Jerry's make ice cream from human breast milk.
• #picnic08 was topping the trends earlier but has fallen off as attendees of this conference in Amsterdam settle in for the evening.

On the political front, Obama, Sarah Palin, Biden, and McCain are trending as expected. Apple, iPhone, T-Mobile G1, and AT&T are still trending as yesterday's technology news continues to drive discussion.

Update!

• John McCain jumped to the number one trend after news that he's canceling the first presidential debate.
  

I've just taken a quick look at what's trending on Twitter right now and tried to explain why in 140 characters or less.

• T-Mobile is trending because Google and T-Mobile have announced G1 a fancy new computer phone like the iPhone.
• Obama is generating tweets today as people react to his comments on CNN from Florida about the current state of the US economy.
• Heroes is still inspiring tweets even after the US premiere of its new season—lots of folks are just now watching it via DVR or online.
• Sarah Palin trends every day but today folks are tweeting about her visit to the UN and that she's only had a passport since 2007.
• iPhone is generally popular but trending more today because of a power adapter recall and the new competitor from Google.
• Adobe is generating tweets today because they've announced their flagship software suite, Adobe CS4.
• Paulson is showing up in the Twitter trends as people exchange opinions about the government bailouts in the US.
• Mothra is trending apparently due to a growing meme of "Your Mothra..." jokes—not sure what's up with that.
• Apple seems to be trending for two reasons: folks are eating a lot of apples today and they're discussing iPhones and other Apple products.

Andrew Ratner from the Baltimore Sun takes a little tour of history's short messages in his article, We're all a-twitter being succinct.

Samuel Morse tapped out this historic message upon inventing the telegraph: What hath God wrought?

22 characters long.

Alexander Graham Bell's first spoken words on a telephone: Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.

41 characters.

Neil Armstrong upon walking onto the moon: That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

58 characters.

Hmm, maybe our first tweet should have been more prophetic.

We're getting ready to launch a refresh of parts of the Twitter.com interface. This release does not include any new features (well, one). It's mostly cosmetic changes. This post describes what we're doing and why.

Moving the tabs


The most significant change you'll notice on the logged-in homepage (/home) is that we've moved the tabs that were on the top of the timeline to the right sidebar. We did this for a couple reasons. For one thing, it makes them larger targets and easier to access. But more importantly, it was an investment in the future. We plan to have more tabs, and we'd run out of room putting them along the top. This was the driving factor for this redesign, but you won't see all the benefits until a future release (hopefully, very soon!).

Ajax for speed
When you click on the Home or @Replies tab when you're already on that page, the updates are now refreshed via Ajax, instead of loading the whole page, which should be faster.

Action icons: When you need them
At first you may wonder where the star and reply swoosh beside every update went. Hover over an update to see them show up.

Lighter, Prettier, Simplified
Besides hiding the icons until you need them, we've done many things to try and make the look of the page less cluttered -- like lightening the lines between posts and spacing things out more. Some things we've made smaller (like our logo), while other, more important things, we've made bigger (like the tabs and the Update button). Some things we've made the tough choice to get rid of all together (see below).

We've also done some things for pure aesthetic reasons -- like rounding some corners (which you won't see on Internet Explorer but will in Firefox or Safari -- or Chrome). In general, we think the site looks a lot better. Hopefully you will, as well.

New design customizer
For some people, this design probably does not look better. If you've customized your Twitter colors, it's possible you have a combination that doesn't look quite right with this new design. We did our best to maintain customizations in a pleasing way. But if, for example, you have a white sidebar or sidebar border color, it may not look quite right.

But good news! One new feature we've added is a completely revamped design customizer, which you'll find under Settings / Design.


With this tool, you can choose from pre-designed themes, as well as play with your color scheme and background and see the results in real time.

Removed Archive tab
In the interest of simplification, we've removed the "Archive" tab from /home which showed you your own updates. The reason is, it showed you the same stuff you see on your own profile page, it was oddly named, and people rarely used it. It didn't deserve the space it took. If you miss it, hopefully you'll get used to going to your profile page (which you can get to by clicking on your picture or the Profile link up top).

What we haven't done
This hardest thing about doing a redesign like this deciding what not to tackle. I'm fairly certain that much of the feedback to this will be, "What about...[your favorite feature request / annoyance]." Please be assured the changes we've made here aren't the only things we want to (or will) change. They're not even, necessarily, the most important. The scope of this project was limited to light-weight front-end work. We have whole other teams working on back-end changes and more fundamental functionality changes (which, as mentioned above, this is also laying the groundwork for).

Got feedback? Twitter us.
We'd love to know what you think. Please send your gripes, ideas, and praise (?) for the team. The easiest way is via Twitter (naturally). Just send an update starting with @twitter. Though we might not be able to respond to everyone, as usual, we'll keep a close eye on what you say.

Comedian Demetri Martin sometimes does a bit on The Daily Show about spotting trends. Maybe next time he's on he'll have a look at search.twitter.com first. Trending topics on Twitter are keywords that happen to be popping up in a whole bunch of tweets. We measure these topics and adjust them in real-time throughout the day. It's a great way of finding out what's happening right now.

Today's Trends

Creating a blog post about current trends is challenging because they tend to change while you're writing. However, earlier today folks had Spain on the brain. Whether McCain was taking a hard line against the Spanish government or if he just blanked for a minute during an interview, Twitterers were not giving him a break. Tweets like this one from @bigskyman flew in fast and furious, "The reign in Spain has strained McCain's old brain."

Staying Power

Some trends tend to stick around for a while as people continue to have reactions like this one from Jon MacDonald about trending topic AIG, "Kraft to replace AIG on the DOW Index. Fitting, since most people will soon be eating more Kraft dinners." Twitter also seems to be powering a vibrant backchannel for the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City which people are participating in by adding the keyword #w2e to their tweets. The Dow zooming up at the last minute has lots of folks tweeting in surprise this afternoon.

Sarah Palin continues her reign as queen of the tweets with people still reeling from Tina Fey's spot on impersonation—and eerily similar physical appearance. The Sara Palin baby name generator is still making the rounds as is the topic of her coveted Japanese eyeglasses. The news of Palin's hacked Yahoo! Mail account is old but today people are twittering about the password: "Popcorn." It may have been set by the hacker but nevertheless, it's a salty tidbit today on Twitter.

Movers and Shakers

Moving up the ranks in today's trends is something that shouldn't be there until tomorrow but it's apparently starting a day early. People are already warming up for the yearly event that takes the web by storm: Talk Like A Pirate Day. Arrr you ready for it, matey? I'm also learning just now that It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is premiering a new season tonight—better set the TiVo. It might be fun to try and package these trends up on a regular basis but we'll have to be fast about it!

Today Current TV announced their plan to Hack the Debate with an innovative new way to make television interactive. "As Twitter users tweet throughout the course of the live broadcasts, Current and Twitter will collect comments regarding the debate and layer the individual messages over the debate feed." Why stop at the web and mobile when we can create a new features for democracy?

Twitter is all about what's happening right now but sometimes people like to see what has already happened to add a little context. If you're one of those folks, we want to point out a few recent improvements that may have gone unnoticed. The timeline on home pages now goes back 40 pages instead of only 10, the archive timeline now goes back 3,200 tweets, and the "older" button—well, it works. It is now possible to travel back in time further than ever before.

MG Siegler over at VentureBeat saw our post yesterday about Twitter activity surrounding Governor Palin's acceptance speech and asked if we could share more along those lines. Here is a graph showing Twitter mentions of each presidential and vice presidential candidate during their acceptance speeches at the DNC and RNC. McCain seems to be topping the chart but that's not necessarily a good thing—tweets can be both positive and negative.

My favorite aspect of Twitter has long been the personal immediacy—seeing what's happening in my world right now.  The trending topics found on search.twitter.com now make this possible on a global scale.  Yes, newspapers, news sites, Google trends, and my personal favorite, The Economist, all give me a sense of what has been happening in the world lately.

However, none of these sources match the velocity and focus provided by Twitter.  At a glance I'm able to see what the world considers important in this moment, which lights a path to explore what matters to me.  The trending box in the sidebar makes a great dashboard widget for Mac users.  At the press of a button, my day starts with a sense of what the world cares about.  How do you use Twitter trends?

Governor Palin's speech at the Republican National Convention last night corresponded with a dramatic increase of tweets per second. This graph represents hourly update activity on Twitter over two days this week. Like hurricane Gustav on Monday, and Google's new browser launch on Tuesday, Palin's official nomination acceptance on Wednesday is another example of Twitter being used in real-time during a massively shared event. We continue to see increased activity during storms, earthquakes, breaking news, and more but Politics in particular continues to drive updates, discussion, interaction, and other sustained activity on Twitter.

C—SPAN has built an interesting Twitter integration and Leslie Bradshaw often shares updates on air. CNN also makes use of Twitter and Rick Sanchez has also been broadcasting updates on television as well. The National Press Club recently held a Twitter training session for journalists in advance of convention reporting and there are over 30 members of congress using Twitter. US politics in 2008 is definitely a-Twitter and that's good for us.

This election year will continue to generate activity on Twitter. Search is a good way to follow Political action as we head to the debates and the election in November. API projects like Politweets are another interesting way to take the nation's pulse. We're on the lookout for more like this and we're interested in facilitating much of this discourse from a features standpoint when it makes sense. Interesting stuff!

With nearly two years at full speed, thousands of successes (with as many mistakes), and countless lessons learned, we've finally discovered our rhythm as a team. By carefully regrouping all aspects of our work, breaking the problem down into smaller parts, and iterating rapidly, Twitter, Inc. is poised to bring a new kind of communication to every part of the world.

While our focus on building a stable service is well known, we haven't discussed how we've been organizing our work internally. Twitter is a small company of only 24 full time employees and a network of contractors working in 6 discrete, nimble teams:

Product. Define, design, and support the Twitter products and programs.

User Experience. Craft the user experiences of our products, and develop tools that safeguard those experiences.

API. Develop and manage programmatic access to our services, and vitalize the developer community to harness those services.

Services. Architect and develop our core applications and services.

Operations. Architect, deploy, operate, measure, and monitor our infrastructure, products and services.

The team responsible for the company itself is my team. Our goal is to create an engaging and energetic environment in which to work, and to provide all the other teams with the necessary human, financial, and directional resources they need to make Twitter a success. Each team is staffed by a small number of people working together to craft every detail, always informed by testing, measurement, simple planning and tracking, and lots of creativity.

It's taken some time to put everything in its right place. We're proud of what we've built, and now more than ever, we're proud of how we're building it.