Guidelines for Use of the Twitter Trademark

Thank you for your support and interest in Twitter and the Twitter marks. We strongly believe in the value of an open platform and encouraging the healthy growth of our special ecosystem. As part of that, it’s important for users to be able to trust Twitter and not be confused about our relationship with the many people and organizations who use our marks. This document is designed to help you use our marks without having to worry about negotiating an agreement with us or talking to our lawyers. If you’d like to make any use of our marks that is not covered by this document, you must contact us at trademarks@twitter.com.

Promoting your own Account

Do:

• Say “Follow us on Twitter” with the word ‘Twitter’ as a link to your Twitter account.
• Use the current Twitter logo, current Twitter T or the Twitter buttons as a link to your account:
• Say “Follow us on Twitter @username,” with an optional link from ‘@username’ to your Twitter account (for online, in print, on billboards, on the side of vans, etc.). Please replace ‘username’ with your actual Twitter username.

Refreshed Privacy Policy

As part of rolling out geotagging today we’ve updated our privacy policy to explicitly include geotagging and to describe the public nature of most of what people post to Twitter. We’ve tried to keep it short and sweet with lots of real life examples so it’s simple to read through. We’ll also be letting people know about the new policy via email and @twitter.

Please give the new policy a read and contact us at privacy@twitter.com if you have comments or suggestions.

posted by @macgill at 1:46 PM

Nouvelle saveur : Twitter en Français!

Avec l’ajout de la version espagnole du site le mois dernier, de nombreuses personnes ont rejoint les conversations sur Twitter. De plus en plus de personnes twittent en dehors des États-Unis et nous sommes à présent en mesure d’accueillir les utilisateurs de près de 30 pays francophones. Il est maintenant possible de changer les paramètres de langue en français grâce à la participation des traducteurs qui ont contribué à transformer Twitter en une plate-forme de communication véritablement mondiale.

Les twitteurs français peuvent d’ors et déjà suivre des personnes et des sociétés qui leur sont familières. Que vous fréquentiez @lepicerie ou @lopera pour vos sorties gastronomiques, que vous lisiez @LeMondeFR en allant au travail ou que vous écoutiez @theteenagers sur le chemin du retour ou encore que vous soyez fan des @CanadiensMTL, il y a une multitude d’informations utiles à découvrir à tout moment.

Pour voir Twitter en français, il suffit de consulter vos paramètres et sélectionner “français” dans le menu déroulant.

Une dernière chose : une partie de l’équipe Twitter sera à Paris les 9 et 10 decembré pour la conférence Le Web, présentée par @loic. Les spécialistes de notre plate-forme, Ryan Sarver (@rsarver) et Marcel Molina (@noradio) y présenteront, entre autres choses, une session développeurs. Si vous êtes dans la région ces jours-là, n’hésitez pas à nous rejoindre!

posted by @jennadawn at 5:21 PM

New Google News for mobile

Thursday, November 19, 2009 11:50 AM

At Google, we are committed to giving you a consistent user experience across products and devices, and we really value the feedback you’ve given us about Google News for mobile. Today we’re excited to announce a completely new Google News offering for iPhone, Android, and Palm Pre users. (We already offer a mobile-optimized version of Google News for other phones, such as Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and S60, and more improvements will be coming to those in the near future)

This new version provides the same richness and personalization on your phone as Google News provides on desktop. Our new homepage displays more stories, sources, and images while keeping a familiar look and feel. Also, you can now reach your favorite sections, discover new ones, find articles and play videos in fewer clicks. If you are an existing Google News reader on desktop, you will find that all of your personalizations are honored in this mobile version too.

Google News for mobile is now available in 29 languages and 70 editions.

So pick up your mobile phone and point your browser to http://news.google.com to catch up on news anytime and anywhere. Feel free to check out more information or leave feedback in our Help Center.

Posted by Ankit “Chunky” Gupta and Alok Goel, Mobile News Team

Think Globally, Tweet Locally

In August we announced that we were working on a new API that would provide developers with the ability to geotag tweets. Today, the Geotagging API is officially available.

This release is unique in that it’s API-only which means you won’t see any changes on twitter.com, yet. Instead, Twitter applications like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and others are already supporting this new functionality (go try them out now!) in interesting ways that include geotagging your tweets and displaying the location from where a tweet was posted. The added information provides valuable context when reading your friends tweets and allows you to better focus in on local conversations. Now you can find out what live music is playing right now in your neighborhood or what people visiting Checkpoint Charlie are saying today about the anniversary of the Berlin Wall. These are only the beginning and we are really looking forward to seeing the creative uses emerge from the developer community.

It’s important to note geotagging is disabled by default for all users which means you will need to opt-in in order to use it. To activate the new geotagging functionality, go to your Settings page and click “Enable Geotagging”.

posted by @rsarver at 1:48 PM

Apple built its iPhone business with exclusive carrier deals, like AT&T in the U.S., to make sure it got things right and to maximize profitability. But we expect Apple to increasingly break those deals and sign on multiple carrier partners per country.

Why? Because as Morgan Stanley analyst Kathryn Huberty notes today, its market share could easily double (or more) when it’s distributed by multiple carriers in each region. That’s because in many markets — especially the U.S. — consumers pick their mobile carrier first, and their phone second.

To be sure, that will likely lead to lower profit per unit. But Apple could some make that up in volume and revenue from other services, such as MobileMe, app revenue, etc. And because the fast-growing smartphone industry is a platform war, Apple has some incentive to value market share gains over margins.

This chart, via Morgan Stanley’s Huberty, shows Apple’s current market share — last 12 months — in blue, and its potential market share with multiple carrier partners in gold.

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Follow the Chart Of The Day on Twitter: www.twitter.com/chartoftheday

Google Wave Entities

A wave is a threaded conversation, consisting of one or more participants (which may include both human participants and robots). The wave is a dynamic entity which contains state and stores historical information. A wave is a living thing, with participants communicating and modifying the wave in real time. A wave serves as a container for one or more wavelets defined below.

A wavelet is a threaded conversation that is spawned from a wave (including the initial conversation). Wavelets serve as the container for one or more messages, known as blips. The wavelet is the basic unit of access control for data in the wave. All participants on a wavelet have full read/write access to all of the content within the wavelet. As well, all events that occur within the Google Wave APIs operate on wavelet level or lower.

When you spawn a wavelet from within a wave, you do not inherit any access permissions from the parent wavelet. During the lifetime of a wave, you may spawn private conversations, which become separate wavelets, but are bundled together within the same “wave.” Since events occur at the wavelet level or below, the context of an event is restricted to a single wavelet. A wavelet may be created and managed with a robot as its only participant. This allows the robot to use the wavelet effectively as a private data document. These data documents are never rendered/revealed to the user and may contain structured or unstructured data about the wavelet.

A blip is the basic unit of conversation and consists of a single messages which appears on a wavelet. Blips may either be drafts or published (by clicking “Done” within the Wave client). Blips manage their content through their document, defined below. Blips may also contain other blips as children, forming a blip hierarchy. Each wavelet always consists of at least one root blip.

A document is the content attached to a blip. This document consists of XML which can be retrieved, modified or added by the API. Generally, you manage the document through convenience methods rather than through direct manipulation of the XML data structure.

Twitter to Add User-Curated Lists

Lists are coming to Twitter to help users curate…

“The idea is to allow people to curate lists of Twitter accounts. For example, you could create a list of the funniest Twitter accounts of all time, athletes, local businesses, friends, or any compilation that makes sense.Lists are public by default (but can be made private) and the lists you’ve created are linked from your profile. Other Twitter users can then subscribe to your lists. This means lists have the potential to be an important new discovery mechanism for great tweets and accounts.”

Sounds like a great feature. Will be helpful for separating art from junk.