We want to take a moment to explain some of our general Trust and Safety policies and procedures, and address the specific case at hand that has unfolded over the past 48-hours (we normally don’t address matters pertaining to individual accounts for the privacy of the account, but here the relevant communications are now public).

When our Trust and Safety team receives a report from a user explaining that his/her private personally-identifiable information has been posted on Twitter, we investigate the issue and temporarily suspend the account if it is found to be violating our Guidelines & Best Practices. We make it possible for people to report posting of their private information because it may be used to harass or intimidate, and in certain circumstances may even be illegal. We have systems in place to address such behavior. 

Before the violating account is unsuspended, we ask the account holder to do two things:

1. we ask that they confirm that they understand our private information policy, and
2. we ask them to state that going forward they will follow the Twitter Terms of Service. 

Once they have confirmed this for us in their email response, their account is unsuspended. Additionally, if we receive a notice from the complainant rescinding their original complaint, the account is unsuspended.

The Trust and Safety team does not actively monitor users’ content. In all cases, whether the user is the head of a major corporation, a celebrity, or a regular user, we require a report to be filed at our abusive users webform. Not only do we need a report, but we need a report from the person whose private information has been posted, or someone who is able to legally act on their behalf. We do not proactively report or remove private information on behalf of other users, no matter who they are. 

We’ve seen a lot of commentary about whether we should have considered a corporate email address to be private information. There are many individuals who may use their work email address for a variety of personal reasons — and some may not. Our Trust and Safety team does not have insight into the use of every user’s email address, and we need a policy that we can implement across all of our users in every instance.

That said, we want to apologize for the part of this story that we did mess up. The team working closely with NBC around our Olympics partnership did proactively identify a Tweet that was in violation of the Twitter Rules and encouraged them to file a support ticket with our Trust and Safety team to report the violation, as has now been reported publicly. Our Trust and Safety team did not know that part of the story and acted on the report as they would any other.

As I stated earlier, we do not proactively report or remove content on behalf of other users no matter who they are. This behavior is not acceptable and undermines the trust our users have in us. We should not and cannot be in the business of proactively monitoring and flagging content, no matter who the user is — whether a business partner, celebrity or friend. As of earlier today, the account has been unsuspended, and we will actively work to ensure this does not happen again.

Posted by Alex Macgillivray, General Counsel - @amac

Only the world’s best athletes get to experience the thrill and privilege of marching in the Parade of Nations at the opening ceremonies. And as they tweeted pictures during every step of their memorable night, they took all of us along with them.

Getting there... twitter.com/shuvolleygb/st…

— shauna mullin (@shuvolleygb) July 27, 2012

The australian Olympic team soaking it in twitter.com/cabezadelfino/…

— Carlos Delfino (V) (@cabezadelfino) July 27, 2012

Of course, @NBCOlympics was also front and center, tweeting the Parade:

Did you miss him? He's fast! Here's @twitter.com/PaulMcCartney/…

— Paul McCartney (@PaulMcCartney) Twitter.com/#Olympics.

Posted by Andrew Fitzgerald, Manager, Editorial Programming (@magicandrew)

When it comes to events that capture the world’s attention, the Olympic Games have long been the gold standard — and never more so than right now, when Twitter is on hand for every competition. Even today, heading into the Opening Ceremony, we’re already seeing more Tweets about the Olympics in a single day than we did during the entire Beijing games in 2008. (Yes, you read that right.)

With the entire world tuning in to enjoy the games, Twitter will carry the roar of the crowd. And as the drama and emotion unfold over the next 17 days, we’ll be shining a spotlight on the incredible stories that emerge. To bring American fans closer to every moment in London, we’ve partnered with NBC Olympics, the official broadcaster of the games, to create NASCAR and the July 26, 2012

Good to get out on the pitch and get a scrimmage under our belt! Pretty good to get a 2-1 win over the world no.1 Holland, as well. ryanseacrest & @gabrielledoug @
Even if you’re not currently on Twitter, you’re invited to join the party. When you see the #Olympics hashtag displayed on air, that’s your invitation to check out the action on Twitter. The page will be available to anyone in the US who visits @ChloeS)

We are sorry. Many of you came to Twitter earlier today expecting, well, Twitter. Instead, between around 8:20am and 9:00am PT, users around the world got zilch from us. By about 10:25am PT, people who came to Twitter finally got what they expected: Twitter.

The cause of today’s outage came from within our data centers. Data centers are designed to be redundant: when one system fails (as everything does at one time or another), a parallel system takes over. What was noteworthy about today’s outage was the coincidental failure of two parallel systems at nearly the same time.

I wish I could say that today’s outage could be explained by the cascading bug. Instead, it was due to this infrastructural double-whammy. We are investing aggressively in our systems to avoid this situation in the future.

On behalf of our infrastructure team, we apologize deeply for the interruption you had today. Now — back to making the service even better and more stable than ever.

- Mazen Rawashdeh, VP, Engineering (@mazenra)

This year, the superhero-themed #PJPregunta. When the stars make their trip down the blue carpet tonight, they’ll be asked questions straight from the fans.

Music duo Chino y Nacho encourage their fans to submit questions:

Si les gusta como estaremos vestidos mañana durante @ChinoyNacho @Do you think that by the end of the year you will have a new song? Talk about your projects. @ChinoyNacho @premiosjuventud #PJPregunta

With so much happening out on the blue carpet, you wouldn’t want to miss the buzz backstage. You can get a behind the scenes glimpse of rehearsal this week by following twitter.com/PremiosJuventu…

— Premios Juventud (@PremiosJuventud) univision on 7/19 from 8-11pm ur not gonna wanna miss this daleeeeeee!

— Pitbull (@Pitbull) @PremiosJuventud and #PremiosJuventud. During this year’s Premios Juventud show, the fans will be heard, and the stars will be listening -- and Twitter’s the only superpower you need.

Posted by Grace Chu Lee, TV Parternships Team (@gracelee)

Cross-posted on the TweetDeck Blog

Today you can more easily discover and react to the information you care about with new navigation features in TweetDeck. You have given us some really useful feedback after using these features on web.tweetdeck.com, and now you can use this swifter TweetDeck on other platforms too by visiting tweetdeck.com.

Here’s an overview of what’s changed.

Browse easily

Now your columns are arranged in one continuous horizontal row, allowing you to navigate smoothly left and right with the scrollbar.

You can scroll several columns at a time by clicking the arrows either side of the “Columns” button on the top toolbar. You can also click the “Columns” button to reveal the full list of all the columns in your TweetDeck and access any column immediately.

Manage your columns

With the addition of the new Columns button it’s now easier to arrange your columns. With the column drop-down open, simply hover over the “drag” icon to the right of the column name you wish to move, click and drag the column to its new position, then drop.

Act on what's happening

A menu icon on every Tweet gives you instant access to more Tweet actions, like “Create link”, and user-related actions, like “Block”. This makes it possible report a user for spam, add an account to a list, delete your own Tweet, and much more, all without having to leave your main column view.

This swifter version of TweetDeck is available now at tweetdeck.com, where you can download TweetDeck for Mac and Windows, access the Chrome app or sign in to web.tweetdeck.com.

Posted by Richard Barley (@richardbarley), Product Manager, on behalf of the TweetDeck team

Today you can download a new version of Twitter for BlackBerry from the App World. This update gives you a richer experience of any Tweet and supports right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew.

Now when you expand a Tweet to see the details view, you can enjoy images from pic.twitter.com in full resolution and RIM maps for geolocated Tweets. It’s also easier to see how a single Tweet fits into a broader conversation from the details view with previous Tweets and replies.

Posted by Brian Frank (@bfrank), Product Manager, on behalf of the Mobile team

Nokia, the most widely used mobile platform in the world, now offers a fast, native Twitter experience for Series 40 feature phones. Beginning today, millions of people who use Nokia Series 40 devices can download Twitter for Nokia in the Nokia Store.

If you have a Nokia S40 device, you can sign up for Twitter directly from your phone, read Tweets from all of the accounts you follow, connect with others, and more. Download Twitter for Nokia now in the Nokia Store to discover one of the richest experiences available on your device.

Posted by Brian Frank (@bfrank), Product Manager, on behalf of the Mobile team

Twitter is all about making real-time information available to everyone, everywhere. In order to reach every person on the planet we recently released an update to mobile.twitter.com for feature phones and older browsers. We completely overhauled this client from the ground up, a process that resulted in a lighter-weight, faster client that looks and feels like twitter.com and our mobile apps.

Here's the home timeline on mobile.twitter.com, before and after the redesign:

On the top level, we brought the user interface in line with the new version of Twitter that we launched back in December, so you can enjoy a consistent experience on any device. Under the hood, we completely overhauled the view layer for our RAILS backend, with new mustache templates and streamlined stylesheets.

Mobile engineering and Design had about nine weeks to design, prototype, develop, test, and calibrate mobile.twitter.com for launch. There were a handful of challenges we took on:

• support more than 13 different browsers on thousands of different devices, each with their own rendering idiosyncrasies
• accommodate input methods with dissimilar requirements
• build layouts with pre-CSS3/HTML5 standards
• optimize for browsers with javascript turned off
• scale gracefully from resolutions as small as 240 by 240 pixels all the way up to widescreen views on the desktop
• minimize page sizes for slower networks
• make it look and feel like Twitter, even without images.
• pave the way for even more feature consistency with other twitter.com clients

The first thing we did was look at and expand our collection of data. How often do people use the refresh control or load more Tweets? Where were the pain points with sign up or sign in? What Tweet actions did people engage with most? How often did people Tweet? We used data from all of these actions throughout the process to inform design and architectural decisions.

We began the process by sketching out proposals for primary views and navigation. Next, we fleshed out details like the Tweet anatomy and interaction flows for tasks like tweeting, searching, and writing direct messages:

After some on-paper iterations and reviews with the design and mobile-web teams, we quickly jumped into HTML/CSS wireframes that we could begin playing with on targeted devices. Even a simple wireframe of a single view proved extremely valuable in setting the tone for the project. It made the product vision much more concrete and gave us a starting point for front-end work.

Here's what the first pass looked like on a Samsung Corby:

Next, we built out main views like "Home," "Connect," "Discover," and "Me." We added a text-only fork in the stylesheets, built in adaptiveness, and contextualized the Tweet anatomy. This was one of the biggest design challenges that we faced in the update: how to be faithful to the structure and behavior of Tweets that users expect elsewhere on Twitter in extremely low-resolution views? How to accommodate touch, pointer, and five-way input methods gracefully? We took a hard look at the numbers and tested at least three different versions before we made a decision.

At this point, we had a baseline to work with — but we still needed a comprehensive set of designs for everything else: sign up and sign in flows, logged out views, errors, notifications, and profile subviews like followers and favorites. There was a lot to keep track of, and we found that going back to basics and simply printing out designs to post near our workspace helped orient us. It gave the team a quick, easy way to reference designs while we were working, and a way for us to catch inconsistencies.

All along the way, we faithfully tested what we were building on an array of devices (we have over 300 in our inventory!):

After more than two months of work, we had a mobile.twitter.com with many improvements including:

• pages that were up to 63% smaller than those in the old mobile.twitter.com
• sessions that were up to 37% smaller
• 63% fewer requests in some views, like profile pages

When we finally rolled out the new version 100% to our users, we were ecstatic to see so many positive responses:

Of course, we also heard from people about bugs and features not yet integrated. We faved those Tweets to track further progress, and can report that JavaScript support and enhancements for widescreen views are coming soon!

Change is always difficult because it means, among other things, having to relearn what was once comfortable and familiar. But we hope that the initial pains of readjustment quickly lead you to appreciate this faster, more comfortable and easier-to-use mobile.twitter.com on feature phones and older browsers.

Posted by Coleen Baik (@colbay), Designer, on behalf of the Mobile team

Today you can download new versions of Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android. These new apps contain several updates to bring you closer to everything you care about.

Expand Tweets

Since we Kickstarter project, for example, you can play its video directly from the Tweet details view in your app. You can also read article summaries when you tap Tweets linking to sources like Vimeo. This new experience will roll out gradually to web, iPhone and Android users.

Experience events

Now you can discover the best Tweets and photos for events experiences like watch the race unfold from the perspectives of drivers, celebrities, commentators and fans.)

Search simply

Speaking of search, we've made major improvements in search autocomplete so that you will see more suggestions when you search for people. As before, you can search for real names or @usernames before you complete your query.

Receive notifications

While it’s always been possible to receive Tweets via SMS from your favorite Twitter accounts, these new versions of Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android support push notifications for Tweets. You can get notifications from people you follow whenever they send a new Tweet or Retweet; turn on push notifications for Tweets for any user via the action button on their profile, and edit these notifications in your account settings on your device. Try turning on notifications for local Twitter accounts like @NYscanner to stay on top of what’s happening in your city.

Posted by Sung Hu Kim (@sunghu), Product Manager, on behalf of the Mobile team