Recently active discussions in Twitter

Good news: we've made some changes that should improve your ability to browse back through your personal archives, recent history, and general time line. Specifically:

* The /home timeline increases from 10 to 40 pages.
* The /archive timeline goes 3,200 updates back.
* The older button should work

These changes are rolling out now and should be effective for everyone within the next few days. If you see any problems, please let us know!

I went to log in and my account has been deleted. I can't view my account anymore. I am unable to reinstate the account with my email address. I am not a spammer, but a normal community member/user. I have no idea what I did. Help?

Let's start with the bad news. Beginning today, Twitter is no longer delivering outbound SMS over our UK number. If you have been receiving SMS updates from Twitter via +44 762 480 1423, you'll notice that they've stopped and you may want to explore some of the alternatives we're suggesting.

Note: Updating via our UK number remains fully supported and these changes do not affect users in Canada, India, or the United States.

Before we go into more detail, here's the good news. Twitter will be introducing several new, local SMS numbers in countries throughout Europe in the coming weeks and months. These new numbers will make Twittering more accessible for all the folks who have been using SMS to send long-distance updates through our UK number.

Why Stop Sending SMS To Some Countries?

Mobile operators in most of the world charge users to send updates. When you send one message to Twitter and we send it to ten followers, you aren't charged ten times—that's because we've been footing the bill. When we launched our free SMS service to the world, we set the clock ticking. As the service grew in popularity, so too would the price.

Our challenge during this window of time was to establish relationships with mobile operators around the world such that our SMS services could become sustainable from a cost perspective. We achieved this goal in Canada, India, and the United States. We can provide full incoming and outgoing SMS service without passing along operator fees in these countries.

We took a risk hoping to bring more nations onboard and more mobile operators around to our way of thinking but we've arrived at a point where the responsible thing to do is slow our costs and take a different approach. If you don't live in Canada, India, or the US, then we recommend receiving your Twitter updates via one of the following methods.

1. m.twitter.com works on browser-enabled phones


2. m.slandr.net works on browser-enabled phones


3. TwitterMail works on email-enabled phones


4. Cellity works on java-enabled phones


5. TwitterBerry works on BlackBerry brand phones


6. Twitterific works on iPhones


7. Twitter SMS by The Numbers

It pains us to take this measure. However, we need to avoid placing undue burden on our company and our service. Even with a limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter about $1,000 per user, per year to send SMS outside of Canada, India, or the US. It makes more sense for us to establish fair billing arrangements with mobile operators than it does to pass these high fees on to our users.

Twitter will continue to negotiate with mobile operators in Europe, Asia, China, and The Americas to forge relationships that benefit all our users. Our goal is to provide full, two-way service with Twitter via SMS to every nation in a way that is sustainable from a cost perspective. Talks with mobile companies around the world continue. In the meantime, more local numbers for updating via SMS are on the way. We'll keep you posted.

To quote the September Newsletter:

"Twitter has been making great progress in terms of uptime and
reliability. Fail Whale sightings are far less frequent these
days thanks to our efforts but we still have a long journey
ahead. Last month we saw 99.88% uptime and so far this month we
are at 99.96%."

I'll be frank, uptime is only going to get you so far. I've been checking the status blog since the original issues back in May. Its now september. The pop overs on Track and IM haven't changed since June or so. IM needs more capacity, track needs reworking. Frankly track was one of the best things out there. Great for companies to track their name, great to track events in my area, and of course track my name being said. IM made it easy to get those updates on my desktop instead of my phone. Yet it seems twitter has all but abandoned these two in favor of the almighty Up time. Has anything really happened with them or have they been sitting in the back closet like the favorite toy you no longer care for?

How would you, as a member of the Twitter community, like to flag potential spammers? Right now you can block a spammer or report them via email. We're working on spam handling presently, and I'd like to know what the simple, unobtrusive solution looks like from your point of view. A "report spam" button on profiles, áa Gmail?

I want to start using Twitter. When I click on subscribe it ask me to "save". It saves to a file but when I open it its

Hi Rick;
I was watching CNN when you were on. i heard the comment that you made about chaos in New Orleans and confusion about getting people to evacuate. First of all, you are not there. So, let your coworker who's there, tell us what is really going on there. You don't need to add to it.

I have deleted my original account & I'm trying to delete duplicate account to start over but I can't log in. It creates another account every time I try to log in. I can't even post this problem without signing up again!!!!

PS I've tried following the steps to delete but can't get in to account to delete it!!

I was notified about an hour ago of a new follower with this message: "Jarret Coon (Jmcoon) is now following your updates on Twitter." As is the case whenever I get such notices, I clicked to check Jarret's profile and evaluate whether he was relevant to my life.

When I arrived at Jmcoon's profile, I was greeted with an unusual bio ("Jarret is a 14 year old technologist and financial guru...") and a bizarre following-follower ratio of about 29:5600. A spammer seeking connection with recent twitterers would have the inverse ratio, with many more people he is following than those who are following him. Even more peculiar, the links to show the 29 accounts Jmcoon is following shows no one.

I'm pretty certain I am not following Jmcoon, and I can't see a reason why 5000+ people would be following this person. If something isn't fishy here, more power to Jarret the 14-year-old tech guru. If something is fishy, how did it happen?

i want to get all @reply messages sent to me on my phone so when i'm not at my comp i can still see them. how can i make this happen?

I'm planning to get twitter on my verizon phone, will the verizon charge fees for each twitter post like text messages?

I am signing up for twitter after seeing the profile on World News.

After filling in what I am doing what do I do to submit the comment?

I recently noticed that Comcast's new marketing campaign (at least here in CO) uses the *exact* same logo (the little bird sitting on the branch) as Twitter. Is this intentional?

do all my tweets just disappear after a few months? is there anywhere where i can get all of them, from the very beginning? it's like my little journal... and i want to start to chronicle them all before i get too many. i've seen questions like this before, and one of the answers was to use the "summarise" webpage, or somethingrather. i have done that, and i still can't go all the way back to the beginning. i also can't change the page number to anything more than "10" on my normal home page. i think it would be marevllous to have some kind of feature where we could download all of our tweets, in some kind of text format, to archive.

I've suddenly, as of today, started following a bunch of people that I never agreed to follow. I've tried unfollowing them and it says the change took effect, but then they still show up. I've tried to block them, but that didn't work either. When I blocked them, they would still show up as someone I was following, but when they were blocked and I tried to unfollow them, I'd get a pop-up error saying something went wrong and I needed to refresh the page. They still follow me even if I change my password and try to unfollow them.

Can anyone help me out here? One of the people I don't want to follow is 'mthinks'.

I wanted to alert everyone to some techniques that Twitter spammers are using. This is from a blog post from an SEO blog: http://snurl.com/246e0 . I'm not sure what the best way is to fight these techniques. Any ideas?

Here are some of the techniques described in this post:

1) Setting up a script to follow then un-follow people with the goal of keeping the Follower / Following ration about equal. This is very deceptive and puts an unnecessary strain on Twitter's servers. Twitter, whatever algorithm you're building to detect spammers should look for this kind of activity - i.e. the Following / Followers ratio isn't going to be enough.

2) Using a script to retweet random tweets from the public timeline. This adds zero value and once again, is an unnecessary strain on Twitter's servers.

3) And the nastiest of them all - using a CSRF (Cross Site Reference Forgery) on the spammer's web site so that the unsuspecting Twitter user follows the spammer without even knowing it. From the blog post...

"You can assume that at least some of the people you follow will check out your twitter page and then click through to see your webpage. Armed with this knowledge, you can get them to follow you back without them even realizing it. You do this with a little CSRF. On your page, call out this url: http://twitter.com/friendships/create.... Since they just came from your Twitter profile, you know they are logged in to Twitter. By calling out that url, you tell the Twitter system to make their account follow you. You have to set this up in such a way that you scrub out the referrer on the request, so a simple 1px iframe won't cut it. I'll leave that part to you guys to figure out."

Dallas Morning News - August 6, 2008
LAWMAKERS USING ONLINE SERVICE TWITTER TO KEEP POLITICAL JUNKIES IN THE LOOP DURING PROTEST

By KAREN BROOKS / The Dallas Morning News
kmbrooks@dallasnews.com

The cameras are gone and the lights are out in the U.S. House chamber, but thousands of people are still getting a play-by-play of the Republican uprising against Democratic leaders this week.

How? A little bird is telling them.

A technology called Twitter is allowing political junkies to follow every development in the GOP protesters' decision to stick around after Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi adjourned the House for a five-week break instead of voting on offshore drilling.

Online "tweets" blasted out every few minutes by Rep. John Culberson of Houston, House Minority Leader John Boehner and other prominent Republicans offer updates about blog posts, radio appearances, quotes and real-time descriptions of the action.

"I just took a big group of Americans into the gallery to see this historic day on the House floor," a Culberson tweet said Friday.

Twitter, best described as a cross between text-messaging and blogging, is a site that allows users to update their "followers" with short blasts that can be viewed online or sent directly to desktops, cellphones, and BlackBerrys.

Think of it as a personal ticker. Each tweet is confined to 140 characters, which keeps the pontification to a minimum.

"By using this new technology, I am able to shine sunlight into the deepest corners of Congress," said Mr. Culberson, who had the idea to use Twitter to "cover" the protest after C-Span cameras were shut down and the reporters were shuffled out of the chamber. "I'm convinced that new media will revolutionize the way elected officials represent their constituents."

Dallas blogger Katie Howard said that without the efforts of Mr. Culberson and other readers who are following the protest on Twitter, she'd be in the dark about what is happening in Washington.

"What he has been trying to do to increase the transparency of Congress through new media is wonderful," she said in an e-mail interview. "I commend him for his efforts to involve the people."

Mr. Culberson is pushing the leadership to authorize Twitter and other tools, such as cellphone video, in the House's rules, which are currently ambiguous on the subject. But he's getting blowback from leaders who want to limit their use to only approved communications, he said.

"I'm operating in a twilight zone of the rules because they don't know how to deal with me," he said. "I'm a threat. Social media's a threat."

When I click "Follow" on someone's page, it says I'm following them but they don't show up under people I'm following. This mainly occurs with people I have followed before and want to follow again (I recently reactivated my account). When I go to follow new people they're added no problem, but when I want to follow people I've followed before they don't get added properly.