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We’ve been heads down working nights and weekends on some new stuff, so have been a little out of the loop on what you’ve all been up to.  However, we noticed a few posts today that made us smile that we thought we’d share…

First up the incomparable @dred242 figured out where Brightkite really came from. Check out his Brightkite biology documentary below:

#hashtags also are proving to have a life all of their own. Tuesday has always attracted a certain amount of exhibitionism, but today the game turned into peek-a-boo, and we saw you. Click on the thumbnails below to see more, and post your own.  #iseeyou

Keep doing the wonderful things that you do, and we’ll be in touch soon with new toys.

As Director of Twitter's Trust and Safety team, a big part of my job is focused on the detection and prevention of spam and abuse. A couple weeks ago, Biz explained how Twitter users were being victimized by phishing scams spread primarily through links in Direct Messages. Basically, people click the link and bad things happen. My team can only detect these scams after malicious links have already been sent out.
Today, we’re launching a new service to protect users that strikes a major blow against phishing and other deceitful attacks. By routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service, we can detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links across all of Twitter. Even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we'll be able keep that user safe.
Since these attacks occur primarily on Direct Messages and email notifications about Direct Messages, this is where we have focused our initial efforts. For the most part, you will not notice this feature because it works behind the scenes but you may notice links shortened to twt.tl in Direct Messages and email notifications. Special thanks to @wfarner and @ram for building this service and helping keep us all a little safer!

On Saturday, we put together a contest where Brightkite members could vote for who they think would win the top 4 Academy Award categories and others could submit an Oscar themed photo that was funny or interesting.

Congrats to srndur and Jon728 who guessed correctly on the winners of Best Actor, Actress and Best Picture. They’ll be receiving a schwag pack from us in the mail full of Brightkite goodies!

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The Photo Contest was pretty interesting. Below are the top 3 submissions for the #Oscars2010 photo contest! All of them are pretty awesome.

1. ianrathbone posted this photo from his in-home adaptation of Best Picture nominee, Avatar:

2. ENeitzel posted this photo as Brightkite makes its big debut on a piece of military equipment used to defuse bombs in The Hurt Locker.

3. A second submission made our top 3 from ENeitzel as a Brightkite “kite” swoops in to save the day as Jeremy Renner defuses a bomb.

It was a tough choice so we opened up voting to our community on this post and it was certainly clear that @ianrathbone’s In-Home Avatar photo was the winner. Congrats to Ian and all of our submissions from the community!

We’ll be doing many many more photo contests in the future so stay tuned!

The 82nd annual Academy Awards will be broadcast live at 5PM pacific and 8PM eastern time on ABC here in the US. We wanted to do something fun and exciting for this year’s Oscars and give out some cool prizes for the best and most interesting submissions.

From Sunday night to Monday morning, we encourage you to post a funny, cool, interesting or wacky photo with an Academy Awards theme and tag it with #Oscars2010. On Monday, we’ll be choosing the best photos and sending our prizes to the winners!

A secondary contest will be running LIVE on Sunday night during the Oscars. We’ll be watching all posts with the tag #Oscars2010 via the Brightkite Wall and you can vote for who you think will win an Oscar on these four categories:

Best Picture: Avatar, The Blind Side, District 9, An Education, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Precious, A Serious Man, Up, Up in the Air Actor in a Leading Role: Jeff Bridges, George Clooney, Colin Firth, Morgan Freeman, Jeremy Renner Actress in a Leading Role: Sandra Bullock, Helen Mirren, Carey Mulligan, Gabourey Sidibe, Meryl Streep Directing: Avatar, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Up in the Air, Precious

We’ll be giving out prizes at random to people who guess the correct Oscar winner for those categories!

So let’s recap:

• Post a zany and funny photo like this one with an Oscars theme.
• Post your Oscar Predictions in real-time and compare the votes of others via our #Oscars2010 Brightkite Wall.
• On Monday, we’ll be announcing some winners to get some schwag and a few prizes!

A few weeks we said a public hello to @jparise and we’ve been busy growing ever since. More people, more users and (soon) more product. Here are some of the latest folk to join the Brightkite team – we are excited, happy and lucky to have them.

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@adamjackson is our new community manager. Adam has been using Brightkite for well over a year and is passionate about our product, the sector and expanding the role of community manager. Please add Adam to your fans and help us welcome him to the community. Before Brightkite Adam has worked at Yoono, Gwanda, Apple in roles ranging from sys admin to store manager to community manager. Adam is never seen without a hat or a smile.

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@tombrightkite is a developer working in our apps group, focused mainly on the iPhone.

As you can see, Tom likes hats with plumage. Tom is from Wisconsin, studied at Carnegie Mellon and has spent most of his career making games (Sony, Electronic Arts). If you see Tom around, please don’t steal the feather from his cap.

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@LJHarb is our new front end web developer.

He’s a heavy social media user and is already enjoying having added Brightkite to his toolkit. Before Brightkite, he helped found MixMatchMusic, a service for musicians. He’s heavily enamored with the location space, and isn’t shy about voicing his opinions to help improve products he’s passionate about. So far he’s been 100% focused on something that we aren’t going to tell you about yet ;-)

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@apetlock is also part of the growing developer team – working across both web and back end platforms.

Allen is a Ruby & Python guy who’s career has taken him all around the Bay Area. The most important thing to know about Allen is that he has the best collection of head-turning Hawaiian shirts you’ve ever seen. Legendary.

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We’ve been quiet in recent weeks, but our expanded team has been heads-down building new things that we are very excited by. We’ll be in touch soon to share them with you.

Even before Twitter was officially a company, we opened our technology in ways that invited developers to extend the service. Before long, Twitter became a platform and an ecosystem of innovation began to grow. Recently we’ve announced partnerships with Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft. These Web leaders gained access beyond our free offerings—we licensed them the full feed of all public tweets. This “Firehose” of data is made possible by our Streaming API developed at Twitter by John Kalucki and team. There is a lot of useful information in this stream of data.
Full investment in this ecosystem of innovation, means all our partners should have access to the same volume of data, regardless of company size. More than fifty thousand interesting applications are currently using our freely available, rate-limited platform offerings. With access to the full Firehose of data, it is possible to move far beyond the Twitter experiences we know today. In fact, we’re pretty sure that some amazing innovation is possible.
Today, we’re happily turning the Firehose on for some new partners focused mainly on exploring the incredibly rich field of real-time search and discovery. We are thrilled to announce that Ellerdale, Collecta, Kosmix, Scoopler, twazzup, CrowdEye, and Chainn Search join us as partners. These companies range from funded startups to part-time, one-person operations so we came up with a fair way to license access that scales with their business. If you think there may be a potential partnership involving access to the Firehose, let's start a conversation. Our email is api@twitter.com.

If you enjoy the little things in life we’ve got something for you. The Brightkite widget is a simple way to place Brightkite content on your blog, your Myspace page and many more places besides. We’ve got two flavors – the personal widget to show the stream of a person, and the place widget to show the stream of a place. Simple.

But wait, there’s more! You can decide what sort of content to have in the stream – photos, posts, checkins. You can decide the colors, the size and the text size.

If you are a bar or a restaurant, put one on your web page to show content from people visiting. Our friends over at GriffinTech used the widget last month to log their road trip across country – you can see it over at www.cesbound.com.

Send us a DM to Brightkite showing us how you are using your widget, and we’ll send you some goodies!

Below is an example of the widget using the Brightkite user profile. Find the widget in the footer at the bottom of each page.

Over the past few days, Twitter has been helping folks victimized by a phishing attack. Phishing is a deceitful process by which an attempt is made to acquire sensitive information such as Twitter usernames and passwords. The bad guys masquerade as someone you trust and may send you a Direct Message (DM) with a link. This DM may say something along the lines of, "LOL that you??" followed by a link to a fake Twitter login page. If you enter your credentials on that fraudulent page, the phishers can sign in as you and trick more people.

Anatomy of A Phishing Scam

Generally a phishing attack against Twitter users breaks down to a three-part process. First, accounts compromised in the manner described above send out messages to all accounts following them. Second, accounts that are newly compromised send out more messages. Third, the scammers behind the phishing attack make an attempt at monetization by sending out spam links instead of links to a fake login page. We fight phishing scams by detecting affected accounts and resetting passwords. However, it's better to stop them before they start.

Avoiding Phishing Scams

We designed the Direct Message system so that you could only get DMs from accounts that you choose to follow—this cuts way down on spam and attacks. Our Trust and Safety team identifies and deletes spam accounts every day. Still, we recommend against indiscriminately following hundreds or thousands of accounts without having a look first. To learn how you can avoid falling victim to a phishing scam or if you have other questions about keeping your Twitter account secure, please read Keeping Your Account Secure at our help site.

For regular status updates on related issues. please follow @safety and @spam. There is also a Twitter status blog that we update regularly. For a lot more information about Phishing, check out this article on Wikipedia.

In other words: Yahoo! People want to discover and share tweets everywhere ranging from SMS and TV, to apps and the Web. For a global network of 600 million people, Yahoo! represents the Web. Similar to the partnerships we have made with other large internet companies, Yahoo! will receive what has been dubbed "Firehose"—a full feed of public tweets sent to Twitter and our partners every second of every day from all around the world.

Through this arrangement, people will be able to find relevant tweets in Yahoo! Search as well as other popular products and properties, including the Yahoo! Homepage, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sports, and more. Yahoo! will also be able to build unique Twitter clients into their properties making it easier for folks to tweet wherever they feel comfortable within the Yahoo! network.

From our perspective, this partnership represents a big opportunity. Tweets may be short, but they have proven over and over again to contain valuable information. As the Twitter information network grows and expands, it becomes more valuable for everyone who participates. Our open approach helps us get closer to providing universal connectivity to a global network of immediate information.

Hi, I'm the other @evan, and I'm the infrastructure manager at Twitter. I want to tell you about the steps we've taken to make our engineering division more open and transparent.

First, we've created an open source directory for the entire company. This lists all the public software that the engineering teams have created or contributed to. Much of Twitter's success has been enabled by open-source software, and we want to give back. Everyone is welcome to use this software for their own projects, and if the project is Twitter-related, so much the better.

We've also begun posting to our new engineering blog, which focuses on day-to-day engineering challenges. Subscribe to it if you're interested in the development of Twitter internals. We'll try to sample the full range of software development issues we face at a fast-moving company like Twitter. We already have posts about how local trends are organized, how we attack capacity problems, and how you can use our translation libraries.

Finally, we've updated our job descriptions to better reflect our company culture and the skills we're looking for. My team is looking for performance, systems, and Ruby engineers, but the company is hiring across all groups, so check out our full listings.

To keep up with all these developments in one convenient place, just follow @twittereng on Twitter itself.

As a member of the Twitter analytics team, part of my job is to measure and understand growth. The graph above tells a story of how we've grown over the past three years in terms of number of tweets created per day. Please note that tweets from accounts identified as spam have been removed so the counts in this chart do not include spam.

Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that's an average of 600 tweets per second. (Yes, we have TPS reports.)

Tweet deliveries are a much higher number because once created, tweets must be delivered to multiple followers. Then there's search and so many other ways to measure and understand growth across this information network. Tweets per day is just one number to think about. We'll make time to share more information so please stay tuned.

Boston based scientist Albert-László Barabási (author of the excellent book ‘Linked‘) just studied 50,000 mobile phone owners to see where and how they moved. His results?  He found that most people don’t move very far from home.

“The surprise was that we couldn’t find unpredictable people,” Barabási says. “We are all boring.”

Well hold on a moment, Mr Albert-László Barabási!

Meet the Brightkite Truckers…

Take a view from the cab of a big rig, as these guys cover the roads from Alaska to Florida (and beyond).

And meet the drivers – become their fans and live vicariously through people who don’t stay close to home.

If you have been following the events in Haiti since the devastating quake last month, then you know of the initial bursts of compassion. International dialogue now shifts from lifesaving relief to long term restoration. Officials are saying this may take ten years at a cost of billions.

Post-disaster needs assessment is underway and there will be an international donor conference late next month in New York City. In the meantime, there are ways to stay involved in sustained efforts such as the WFP's monthly donation program.

Kevin Thau and our mobile team have recently arranged free SMS tweets for Digicel Haiti customers. To activate the service, mobile phone users in Haiti can text follow @oxfam to 40404. Accounts are created on the fly and any account can be followed this way.

We experience events like the Olympics, the Super Bowl, the Oscars, and the State of the Union address together by watching them on television—it's the next best thing to being there for most of us. I (@ChloeS) collaborate with our media partners, and have enjoyed watching them weave together new ways of experiencing these events that are even more engaging and interactive.

CNN's recent State of the Union experiment and MTV’s Video Music Awards effort are recent examples. For the Olympics, NBC worked with Stamen Design to produce a Twitter Tracker capturing Olympic highs and lows—the joy, the disappointment, and the humor. Check out the shift in attention on Wednesday night from Shani Davis' speed skating gold run to the halfpipe antics of Shaun White (during his "Double McTwist 1260," Stamen tracked over 1,000 tweets per minute about Shaun):




The NBC Olympics Twitter Tracker showcases reactions with an authenticity and passion that can only come straight from the fans and athletes.

So many of us want to experience the full richness of an event, television show, or news story. Increasingly, this means participating in it, and then seeing that very participation reflected in the event itself. We’re only just scratching the surface of this opportunity but we're pretty excited about more experiments like this in 2010.

Life is a beautiful thing, but all good things come with some risk. From an early age we are taught to look before we cross the road, to buckle up when we drive a car and to wear suitable protection when practicing our love technique. We believe Brightkite (and sharing our location generally) is also a wonderful thing with many social benefits. Without wanting to sound too maternal, we thought it might be useful to post our thoughts on how to practice safe check-ins and posts.

1. Think about who your friends are.

The culture of other social networks is that more friends and followers suggests that you are more popular. We think this is silly. With Brightkite, we suggest that less is more. With Brightkite, you pick who your friends are, and only your friends can see the posts that you post to Friends.

Do you want your mom or your boss to know where you are at 2am? Think about your friends as the people who you want to share your intimate social life with – the people you’d invite to a party.

Note that Brightkite is different to other social tools, in that our friend system is asymmetrical. When you say Lucy is a friend, she can see your private posts, but you can’t see her posts unless she says you are her friend. Just because you invite her to your party, doesn’t mean she has to invite you to hers.

2. Don’t post your home address

If you post from your home address, then people know where you live. That also means they know when you are home and when you are not. We strongly suggest that you don’t post from your exact home address (choose the city or intersection rather than the address). If you do post your home address, definitely only post to your friends (see above).

You can also post with no location at all, if you have some important news to share, but its not tied to a place.

3. Consider the audience for each post

One of the core features of Brightkite is the ability to choose the privacy for each post. If you are in Starbucks at 11am with your boss – post it to everyone, why not? If you are dancing on the tables at 5am on a school night, consider posting this to your friends only (see above – think about who your friends are).

Brightkite is designed to let you get more out of life – to spend more time with friends, and have more face time and less screen time. We’ve built rigorous and flexible  privacy settings to allow you to do this safely. Just like everything, use your noggin and a little bit of common sense and all will be good with the world.

Uh-oh. Need a morning after pill?

Sometimes, we all make mistakes. If you realize you’ve been foolish, then you can go back and delete a post. Be careful though, if you’ve shared to Twitter and Facebook, then there is no way for us to pull it back. Use delete as last resort.

If you think there are ways they we can improve our privacy settings, or you have questions at any time, please let us know.

My name is @kevinweil and I'm on the analytics team at Twitter. The convergence of sports, brands, and culture around the Super Bowl makes for a particularly fascinating set of tweets to follow. Fans of the @NFL watch the Super Bowl for the football and others enjoy the spectacle for the commercials. We were curious to understand how these groups interacted with Twitter as the game unfolded.

We categorized each incoming tweet as about the Super Bowl itself, about the brands or the commercials, or neither. Dividing each group by the total volume of tweets, we produced the graph below which represents a minute-by-minute reflection of people's thoughts and emotions during the game.

The horizontal axis is time. The vertical axis is a percentage: the blue line is the percentage of tweets, relative to the total worldwide tweet volume, that were about the Super Bowl each minute, while the red line is the percentage of tweets that were about brands or commercials. Click the image for a more detailed version.


You can see excitement spike with the kickoff at marker A. Everyone watching was geared up for the first commercial break at marker B, hoping for funny or memorable ads; as soon as the first commercial break began, viewers were immediately tweeting about it. The first @DoritosUSA ad at marker C caused the largest per-minute volume of commercial-related tweets -- for the minute following the ad, related tweets were 19% of all tweets we saw, eclipsing even the chatter around the Super Bowl itself for a brief period. Back in the game, excited or dismayed tweets following the first @Colts touchdown at marker D formed nearly 40% of all tweets that minute. The second half began with a bang as @TheSaints recovered a surprise onside kick, and for the next minute 44% of all worldwide tweets were about football. Chatter around brands had meanwhile dropped to much lower levels until @Google's Parisian Love commercial sparked viewers once more. Excitement around the game grew steadily with large peaks following scores and turnovers up until the final moments. As the game ended, one out of every two tweets on Twitter was about the Super Bowl!

Every day millions of people interact with Twitter to share and discover what's happening now. Major events like the Super Bowl focus people around a few common topics. There is real value in being able to measure the reach and influence of those topics in real time, and we in the analytics team are looking forward to a lot more where this came from. On to the Winter Olympics...

You are used to looking at Brightkite streams on your phone or on the web. Sometimes you use the Augmented Reality app, because its cool to see Brightkite friends and posts superimposed on the real world around you. Sometimes you throw up a wall to share Brightkite in a bigger room. But what if you could look down on your Brightkite buddies from space?

Thanks to Julien Terraz and his fantastic geocodearth project, you can now do just that. The images here don’t do justice to the animated awesomeness of the actual service. Check it out for yourself at www.geocodearth.com and be sure to say thanks to Julien.

We have a bunch of beta invites to give out, so send a dm to @brightkite if you want one.

The second biggest sporting event of the year is here!  The Indianapolis Colts vs. the New Orleans Saints.  Your Living Room.  The local dive bar.  ESPN Zone. The Sun Life Stadium in Miami Florida? Most of us will be huddled around a TV in bars and living rooms across the country with friends and neighbors watching the game (or watching the ads). Here’s what we we’re thinking…

1. You invite us to your party…

Share your preparations, thoughts, opinions, photos, smack-talk, homemade salsa, celebrations, tears and locations using Brightkite. Let us all know where you are, who you are with and what you are thinking. Use hashtags #superbowl, #SB44, #colts, #saints, or even #whodat to share with the rest of Brightkite (and Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc).

2. We’ll invite you to ours…

Join the global Brightkite Superbowl Party by watching the Superbowl Wall. The wall is a dynamic view into the Brightkite stream designed to be projected or shown live at an event. You can throw the wall up on a laptop at your party or connect it to a bigger screen. We are working with some sports bars in Indianapolis and New Orleans to show the wall, so that everyone can see your touch down celebrations. Remember to post to ‘everyone’ if you want your post to go on the public wall – but remember that anyone can see it!

Get the Brightkite Superbowl wall here.

If you are hosting a party, or own a sports bar and would like some help setting up the wall, getting some stickers or just want to tell us about it, please email us a help (at) Brightkite (dot) com

The biggest sporting event of the year? We’ll have to wait until June, but some of us are already excited.

Because many of you use twitter.com to read and write tweets, we've been spending some time focusing on ways to improve your experience on the site. Today, we're introducing a feature called Hovercards that will be a handy way to interact with the folks behind each tweet.
On any timeline, as its namesake suggests, Hovercards are cards which appear when you hover over a username or avatar. The cards display additional information about the person and allow you to interact with them while staying within the context of your page.

One way we've found these cards to be useful is to find out more about retweeted people and follow them right there. You can also see more information with an expanded view of the card.

Sending direct messages to people you follow will also be possible with Hovercards so you can interact with tweeters without having to move off the page.
Hovercards will be rolled out in stages so not all of you will be seeing them right away.

And then there were five.

The Brightkite apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Palm have been joined in the stable block by a shiny new native app for Nokia Symbian phones. You can download it for free here.

The app brings the same, award winning, UI from the iPhone and Android apps to the N97, the XpressMusic 5800 and other Symbian series 5 phones. Some Brighkite users have been testing the app for a couple of weeks – you can see some of there comments in their posts: Mariraku & Robonova.

Take the app out for a gallop and, as ever, let us know how we can make it better.

Android users – you are up next for an update. More here soon.