Ever since Jack Dorsey published Twitter’s first tweet on March 21, 2006, the online service has skyrocketed in popularity. Almost four years later, the 10 billionth tweet has been broadcast.

It is unknown exactly when the message was sent. Twitter’s best estimate is some time within the last 24 hours of the announcement.

Personally, I’ve never really understood Twitter. It looks like a great way to make short announcements, but the everyday individual does very little that is newsworthy on a day-to-day basis. Something tells me my friends don’t want to know that I just bought a cup of coffee or that I’m sitting bored at work. But hey, if that’s your thing, tweet on!

Source | The Hosting News
Photo | Flickr

Continue reading: Twitter surpasses 10 billion tweets

With a name that even sounds like the beautiful love interest of a secret affair, Cassandra appears to be positioning itself to steal the hearts of those once in love with MySQL. Twitter is now set to replace its MySQLdatabase system with the open source home wrecker.

Cassandra was originally developed by Facebook and was released to the public via Google’s code repository in 2008. In 2009, the Apache Foundation added it to its project, and in February of 2010, Apache made it a top-level project. It is designed to work with large amounts of data by spreading the data across multiple servers. Its notable feature is that it has no single point of failure.

Twitter joined a growing list of major companies that have adopted Cassandra. Among them are Digg, Cisco, IBM. Cassandra is free and open source software released under the Apache License 2 and is available for download from Apache.org.

Photo: Flickr

Continue reading: Twitter the latest among big players to leave MySQL for Cassandra

Twitter has become very popular in a short amount of time. With it, users can post short updates about what they are currently doing, working on, thinking, or viewing/accessing. For businesses, it is a good way to communicate with others who might not be in the same office or even the same city or country. The downside to this is that Twitter is used by so many others for other purposes, and users are often inundated with requests.

Running a micro-blogging server of your own might be very appealing, particularly if you only need it for a company’s business and do not want outsiders to view it. While hosted solutions like Twitter offer privacy options, you would still be trusting your security to a third party. StatusNet is a free micro messaging platform that powers the also popular Identi.ca.

You can host it on your own domain, share files, create groups, add plug-ins and applications, and access it via both desktop computers and mobile devices. It is a PHP application that stores data in MySQL databases. StatusNet is free software released under the GNU AGPL and is available for download directly from the project’s website.

Continue reading: Micro-blogging on your own domain with StatusNet

To speed up performance on its one billion tweets-per-month network, Twitter has started using BitTorrent to distribute files faster.

Codenamed “Murder,” the project involves transforming Twitter’s servers into BitTorrent distribution clients. User bandwidth is not be utilized, but rather, one seed server distributes files between thousands of other servers owned by the company. This drastically increases the speed at which code updates can be performed.

According to Twitter engineer Ryan King, the new system has already been in place for several months. It’s great to see companies utilize technology like BitTorrent in such innovative ways.

Source | Data Center Knowledge

Continue reading: Twitter uses BitTorrent to boost performance

Bored of traditional domain registration? There’s a new service on the market called Tweetname that lets customers buy domains using Twitter. Simply sign up and tweet the name you want to register. You will then get a message back stating whether or not the registration was successful.

Is the service a good idea? It’s definitely innovative, but nothing more than a novelty in my opinion. The biggest downside is the price- $11.95 (£7.46) per domain. That is 33% more the price of many competitors. So I think I’ll stay with my current registrar, thanks.

Photo | Flickr

Continue reading: Register domains with Twitter

The micro-blogging giant Twitter has handed over management of its domain portfolio to an Australian registrar. It includes a two-year, deal during which the company will manage all of Twitter’s domains. It is a common practice for registrars to provide single portals for customers who need to manage multiple domains.

With this deal, however, the registrar will not simply provide registration services. It will actually look after the domains, renew domains before the expire, and register new ones that suit the company’s interests. Usually this is something done in-house by a company’s IT department. In some cases this can lead to problems when a single individual has control of a company’s domain.

This may be the indication of a new trend, where companies outsource their domain management to IT specialists, allowing them to focus more on their actual sites and services. Such a service would also be helpful for companies involved in trademark disputes. It is unclear if that is part of the Twitter packaged deal.

Continue reading: Twitter Outsources Domain Name Portfolio

I read an interesting piece today about Sarah Palin’s use of social media and her problems with cybersquatting. She not only failed to obtain her name on Twitter, but will need to find a new handle now that she is no longer Governor of Alaska.

Thinking only in the short term, either Palin or one of her staff members (most likely the latter) registered @AKGovSarahPalin as her handle some time ago. More than 63,000 followers and one resignation later, her username no longer fits and she will need to find a new one once she leaves office a month from now.

Palin’s best move would have been to register @SarahPalin as her handle. Even if the Alaskan governor didn’t foresee her resignation when she joined Twitter, what about her next job? I honestly doubt Palin expected to remain governor forever. She should have gone through the legal ropes to get @SarahPalin and saved herself the hassle later.

Continue reading: What Sarah Palin and Twitter can teach us about domain names

News has circulated that Twitter has filed for a trademark for the word “tweet”. The company’s blog, however, makes it clear that it will not go after sincere, legitimate applications and services that use the name. For those domain owners and businesses that have domain names with the word “tweet” in them, that should bring on a sigh of relief.

The scare started when Twitter contacted a company with a web-based Twitter-related service that used the name “tweet” in it. The UI is very similar to Twitter’s, and in combination with the name, Twitter felt that it was too much. Without such similarity, however, the company promises other projects and services are safe.

For those who offer harmful or illegitimate services, however, Twitter reserves the right to pursue necessary action against them. That would include domain name disputes, if the situation arises. The company is also a little more particular about domains that have the word “Twitter” in them, as this is apparently a step above “tweet” in its closeness and similarity to their trademark.

Photo: Flickr

Continue reading: Tweet domains are safe, for the most part

With the Iranian government blocking most contact with the outside world in the midst of the election crisis, Twitter has become an important line of communication for activists and protesters.

A network upgrade at Twitter’s data center was originally scheduled to take place Monday evening, but now the company has decided to postpone in order to keep the site active and available to Iranians.

Twitter’s data center has had to deal with an unprecedented load because of a traffic increase over the last several months. The upgrade is only expected to take half an hour.

There is speculation that it was not Twitter that made the decision, but pressure from the U.S. State Department. Twitter’s cofounder Biz Stone denied this:

The State Dept does not have access to our decision making process. When we worked with our network provider to reschedule the planned maintenance, we did so because events in Iran were tied directly to the growing significance of Twitter as an important communication and information network. We decided to move the date. It made sense fo [sic] Twitter and [our host] to keep sercie [sic] active during this highly visible global event.

Source: Data Center Dynamics

Continue reading: Iran Crisis Delays Twitter Data Center Upgrade

Last week the New York Times ran a feature about several bloggers who had abandoned their blogs. They quoted statistics from Technorati stating that 95 percent of blogs are abandoned, the ruins of the lost World Wide Web. They cite many reasons. Some people thought they would become financially independent. Others thought they would become famous and suddenly have an audience without a major publishing deal. Still others simply no longer had the time to blog.

The question the article does not answer is: why do some people keep blogging? According to Technorati, there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs at any one time, but only 50,000 to 100,000 generate the most page views. Nevertheless, those people who have not become famous or rich continue to blog and probably get visits and comments from people they know with an occasional stranger here and there.

The truth is that some of us blog because we love to write. Blogging is a quick and easy way to get something off your chest. People may read it, or they may not. Writers write because they love it. Moreover, many bloggers who quit undoubtedly thought that the would be the center of attention, but as with most social media (Twitter and Facebook included), it is a participatory culture.

Continue reading: Why people keep blogging