Our daily pre-noon roundup of current Twitter trends.

• Congress and 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.

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


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.

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 #w2e to their tweets. The 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!

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.

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 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 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.

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. 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.