Spring has sprung and we've freed up a bunch of tickets for our first ever official Twitter conference, Chirp. The event will take place on April 14th and 15th in San Francisco. On the first day, we'll gather at The Palace of Fine Arts—an historic building originally constructed for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition. it only costs $140.

Twitter's homepage is a work-in-progress. Today, we're testing a new design that bubbles up more of the information flowing through Twitter. This builds on a series of changes starting last year when we redesigned the homepage to make search and trending topics more visible and easily accessible to everyone. With that version, we brought the power of search.twitter.com to the homepage and let people explore the value of Twitter without an account.


With the new design, we're intentionally featuring more dynamic content on the front page, revealing a sample of who's here, what folks are tweeting about, and the big topics that they're discussing. The homepage now features a set of algorithmically-selected top tweets that automatically appear every few seconds. It also highlights a random sampling of suggested sources; hover over any of them to see a profile summary and their latest tweet. Trending topics now scroll across the page, allowing us to present a large set of trends using little page real estate. Hovering over some of these trends will show a description explaining why the keyword is (or has recently been) popular.

All of our recent changes embrace the notion that Twitter is not just for status updates anymore. It's a network where information is exchanged and consumed at a rapid clip every second of the day. With so much being shared, we know that there's something of value for everyone. People who internalize the value of Twitter understand the power of this simple medium. But it hasn't been easy to make that value transparent or obvious for curious folks coming to Twitter for the first time.

We'll be monitoring the data on this homepage design, and how its effects ripple out to other areas. Expect us to continually try new ideas that help users more easily discover who and what they can find on Twitter, and how they can personalize and filter the stream of rapidly flowing information.

If you look "spam" up in the dictionary, you'll find two definitions. There's the "canned meat" and then there's the "unwanted email." At Twitter, we see spamming as a variety of different behaviors that range from insidious to annoying. Posting harmful links to phishing or malware sites, repeatedly posting duplicate tweets, and aggressively following and un-following accounts to attract attention are just a few examples of spam on Twitter. Like it or not, as the system becomes more popular, more and more spammers will try to do their thing. We’re constantly battling against spam to improve the Twitter experience and we're happy to report that it's working.

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When we designed Twitter, we took a different approach—we didn’t require a relationship model like that of a social network. Keeping things open meant you could browse our site to read tweets from friends, celebrities, companies, media outlets, fictional characters, and more. You could follow any account and be followed by any account. As a result, companies started interacting with customers, celebrities connected with fans, governments became more transparent, and people started discovering and sharing information in a new, participatory manner.

We’ve developed a new set of frameworks for adding this Twitter experience anywhere on the web. Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com. Our open technology platform is well known and Twitter APIs are already widely implemented but this is a different approach because we’ve created something incredibly simple. Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript. This new set of frameworks is called @anywhere.

Twitter will be part of our favorite sites!

When we're ready to launch, initial participating sites will include Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube. Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page—and that’s just the beginning. Twitter has proven to be compelling in a variety of ways. With @anywhere, web site owners and operators will be able to offer visitors more value with less heavy lifting.

Every day, millions of tweets are created. These little bursts of information are about anything and everything—they make Twitter a hub for discovering what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world. A recent burst of interest in location sharing applications, games, and services has many Twitter users excited about appending geographic data to some of their tweets.

Not everyone wants to add their current location to a tweet so this feature is off by default and must be activated to use. Check out Maponics, our partner in providing neighborhood information.