Twitter for Android is one of the fastest growing Twitter applications. Six months ago, it wasn’t among the top 10 most-used Twitter applications. However, in the last two months, usage has doubled, and now it’s among the top five – along with twitter.com, m.twitter.com (our mobile web site), Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Blackberry.

Today, we’re launching a new version of Twitter for Android. It looks and feels more like our other official Twitter applications and provides a more consistent experience across platforms and devices.

Use Twitter without signing in
You can use Twitter for Android even if you haven’t signed in or don’t have an account. You can view trends, browse your interests and see suggested users in several categories, including fashion, entertainment and travel, or search to find out what people are saying about topics you care about, such as big sporting events. You can now also sign up for Twitter from within the app.


Design
We made some significant changes in the design of the new app. When you first sign in, you’ll see your timeline, along with icons along the top that let you view @mentions, messages, and lists. This layout makes it fast and simple to navigate Twitter on your Android device. Also, the @mentions tab now includes Retweets; seeing replies and Retweets in one place offers a quick way to better understand which Tweets are sparking interest and engagement. In addition, we introduced auto-complete for usernames.


Search
We’ve also introduced universal search to this version of Twitter for Android. This means that when you search, you can find Tweets with the term you’re looking for, Tweets sent by people near your location, or people whose user names include that term.

For example, let’s say you want to search for “packers". As you type “packers” in the search box, you’ll see the following suggestions:

• search packers: this will return Tweets that include the word “packers”
• search packers nearby: this will return Tweets that include the word “packers” and are sent by nearby users
• search packers in people: this will return accounts that have “packers” in the name
• @packers: this option will skip search results and take you directly to the account, if it exists (in this example, it does)

And, last but not least, at the bottom of the search section is one of my favorite new features: you can scan your address book to find which of your friends, who have chosen to be discoverable, are also on Twitter. New users will get a chance to do this when they first go through the sign-up process on the app.

You can download Twitter for Android from Android Market on devices with Android 2.1 or higher.

A record 162.9 million people watched this year’s Super Bowl, making it the most-watched television event ever.

The big event had its own Twitter record, too. If you tweeted at 10:07:16pm EST, you helped set a new Twitter record: during the final moments of the game, fans sent 4,064 Tweets per second (TPS) – the highest TPS for any sporting event. That spike shattered the previous record in the sporting world: the 3,283 TPS sent during Japan’s 3-1 victory over Denmark during last summer’s World Cup. In fact, Twitter users shattered that record six times over the course of the game – including early touchdowns by the Packers and Steelers and throughout the halftime show. (Still, all of this Super Bowl tweeting wasn’t enough to top the all-time record of 6,939 TPS, set just after midnight in Japan on New Year’s eve.)

The surprise winner of the Super Bowl? Usher (@UsherRaymondIV). His sudden appearance during the Black Eyed Peas’ (@bep) halftime show performance created the second largest peak in Tweets during the game. Plus, the continued talk about him made him the most talked about person during the Super Bowl. The Peas were next on the list of most-discussed people, followed by Slash, Eminem, and Christina Aguilera. Aaron Rodgers, the most mentioned player, was sixth.

So which commercials and brands were people talking about most during the game? Doritos, whose "Pug Attack" commercial was a popular favorite, was this year’s champion. Audi and Pepsi took a close second and third, followed by Chevy, Coca-Cola and Groupon.