Twitter – Launches its SMS service in Australia!

Twitter has made yet another leap forward. It has continued its trend of launching its SMS services and this time it is Australia. Twitter has partnered with Telstra to provide this service to its Australian Users. Standard service charges apply and its free to receive notifications. It is just like exchanging plain SMS with friends. You can always subscribe it by sending “START” to 0198089488. Once your phone is configured with your Twitter account you can start twittering or following who ever you like. (Courtesy : Official Twitter Blog)

Twitter in German Language

The year 2009 might or might not be remember in the history of social networking. There have been many show downs though. Twitter has been amongst the leaders all new apps and services. Not only its audience has swelled many fold but it has also started services in two countries outside. Twitter has also launched itself in German Language as well. You can set your language preferences by visiting the preference page and select German Language from a variety of other languages. Let’s see how 2010 unfolds for the social networking and what new languages are hosted by different social networking sites and if the next language to be unfolded is your regional language.

Twitter service launched in Ireland and Indonesia

Twitter’s SMS service has been launched at both of these countries ( i.e., Indonesia and Ireland). Most important is the fact, that the carrier service launching this service in these countries won’t charge a dime extra and the subscribers will get benefited from their existing subscriptions. The companies which have participated in launching twitter are 3 Indonesia and O2 Ireland. The twitter blog says that the service is quite simple and the subscribers will send and receive messages like an SMS. The customers of 3 Indonesia will enjoy the extra benefit due to additional functionality added. It is said to be the first carrier in Indonesia supporting photos via MMS service through TwitPic. You can send “START” to 89887. For Ireland users, O2 is also the first service starting Twitter SMS in Ireland. For O2 subscribers, send “START” to 51210 or can also signup for Twitter or activate your account through your already made Twitter account. For more on the cool commands supported by Twitter please visit the official twitter blog. (Courtesy : The Official Twitter Blog)

Twitter Trends 2009 (Courtesy: The Official Twitter Blog)

Looking for overall twitter trends 2009. Well look no more. Here it is straight from the twitter blog http://blog.twitter.com

My name is Abdur and I’m part of the Research team here at Twitter. As Chief Scientist, it’s my job to interpret data so we can understand and appreciate how Twitter is constantly evolving. Since it’s the end of the year, we thought it would be interesting to review the topics and issues that captured global attention over the year. In 2009, Twitter’s Trending Topics helped us understand what was happening around the world showing us that people everywhere can be united in concern around important events; excited about a new movie; or geek-out about a major new technology.

Among all the keywords, hashtags, and phrases that proliferated throughout the year, one topic surfaced repeatedly. Twitter users found the Iranian elections the most engaging topic of the year. The terms #iranelection, Iran and Tehran were all in the top-21 of Trending Topics, and #iranelection finished in a close second behind the regular weekly favorite #musicmonday.

These are Twitter’s top Trending Topics across several categories—an interesting time capsule of what was happening as this decade came to a close.

News Events
1. #iranelection
2. Swine Flu
3. Gaza
4. Iran
5. Tehran
6. #swineflu
7. AIG
8. #uksnow
9. Earth Hour
10. #inaug09

People
1. Michael Jackson
2. Susan Boyle
3. Adam Lambert
4. Kobe (Bryant)
5. Chris Brown
6. Chuck Norris
7. Joe Wilson
8. Tiger Woods
9. Christian Bale
10. A-Rod (Alex Rodriguez)

Movies
1. Harry Potter
2. New Moon
3. District 9
4. Paranormal Activity
5. Star Trek
6. True Blood
7. Transformers 2
8. Watchmen
9. Slumdog Millionaire
10. G.I. Joe

TV Shows
1. American Idol
2. Glee
3. Teen Choice Awards
4. SNL (Saturday Night Live)
5. Dollhouse
6. Grey’s Anatomy
7. VMAS (Video Music Awards)
8. #bsg (Battlestar Galatica)
9. BET Awards
10. Lost

Sports (Teams, Events, Leagues)
1. Super Bowl
2. Lakers
3. Wimbledon
4. Cavs (Cleveland Cavaliers)
5. Superbowl
6. Chelsea
7. NFL
8. UFC 100
9. Yankees
10. Liverpool

Technology
1. Google Wave
2. Snow Leopard
3. Tweetdeck
4. Windows 7
5. CES
6. Palm Pre
7. Google Latitude
8. #E3
9. #amazonfail
10. Macworld

Hash Tags
1. #musicmonday
2. #iranelection
3. #sxsw
4. #swineflu
5. #nevertrust
6. #mm
7. #rememberwhen
8. #3drunkwords
9. #unacceptable
10. #iwish

Labels: 2009, trends

Thank you twitter for sharing your insights with us.

Twitter business applications (courtesy : The Official Twitter Blog)

Twitter has been used in business for some time now. Twitter has not been at all oblivion to the fact, in fact behind the back doors they are always working at something that would add value to our usage of Twitter. Here is the new application they are working on to help businesses interact in a better way with people. Following is the twitter’s official version is how it is carrying on the work on this feature.

My name is Anamitra and I work in the product team at Twitter. For some time now, businesses of all sizes have been using Twitter to deepen their engagement with customers. The simple features that Twitter has offered to all users has worked for business users as well. As Twitter becomes more integral to businesses, they will need more business specific features from Twitter – both on the web and API. We have been working on some of these features and are ready to start a limited beta test of one that’s further along in development.

The feature we are beta testing is called ‘Contributors’ – it enables users to engage in more authentic conversations with businesses by allowing those organizations to manage multiple contributors to their account. The feature appends the contributor’s username to the tweet byline, making the business to consumer communication more personal; e.g. if @Twitter invites @Biz to tweet on its behalf, then a tweet from @Twitter would include @Biz in the byline so that users know more about the real people behind organizations.

Its functionality will be fully supported by the API and will enhance the many Twitter business apps, such as CoTweet and HootSuite.

It’s Not Ready For Prime Time

This feature is one of several in development; some of them will be visible to regular users and some of them will not. Our goal at this time is to get basic feedback from business users and ecosystem partners. The beta will be released to a limited subset of folks for some time so that we can get an idea of how the features work from a system perspective. After we kick the tires a bit, we’ll do a full launch to all business users and ecosystem partners. Stay tuned!