As you know, Twitter is a free service. However, Phil took time to remind folks today in a blog post that if you choose to send and receive some of your Twitter updates by text message, standard texting rates do apply. So, (depending on your particular mobile contract) if you go over your texting limit you might get billed more. Not everyone uses texting with Twitter but if you do, it's good to know what sort of contract you have. Is it unlimited or are you allowed only a fixed amount per month?

We do state that normal rates apply in our FAQ, help pages, and other spots but Phil found some prolific Twitter-texters who were surprised that they went over and got charged. Tomorrow, we're going to scour the site and see if there aren't some more prominent places we can make sure folks are aware of this. In the meantime, do keep in mind that while we don't charge for any of our Twitter services, standard rates do apply if you do text messaging on your phone.

Phil also floats the idea that Twitter somehow earns money from your texting while in fact the opposite is true. We've negotiated for good bulk rates but we still pay for this SMS traffic just like we pay for storage, hosting, employee salaries, Odwalla bars, tea, the occasional team lunch, and all the other parts of running Twitter at Obvious HQ.

Mini-blog is the talk of Silicon Valley - On the web this link might look like any news article but today we shared the front page of the fancy Financial Times print version just to the right of a big photo of Tony Blair. If you're not familiar, FT is the international business newspaper that looks like someone forgot to separate their whites on laundry day.

I cannot definitively say how many births have been Twittered at this point, but I can say that my long time friends Chad and Kami Dibble just updated on their first wee baby: http://twitter.com/chadthebad/statuses/13397251

Congratulations Chad and Kami! You are lovely people and the world is blessed with both the presence of the two of you and little Zo?.

Okay, the heavy lifting for getting IM back and in good shape is mostly done. Jabber and gtalk IM users can start twittering again. Now we just need to get AIM users up to speed! Blaine is coding things up right now and he types really fast.

Twitter is looking to bolster our engineering team with an experienced developer of large-scale systems.

This may be you if you love Twitter and also have:

• BS or MS in Computer Science or equivalent
  
• 5+ years of real-world software development experience
  
• Experience architecting high-volume web applications and/or messaging systems
  
• Excellent and influential communication skills with engineers and non-engineers
  
• Extensive experience programming in C, C++ and/or Java as well as scripting languages (Python, Ruby)
  
• Deep familiarity with Unix/Linux environments, HTTP, TCP-IP
  
• Experience with Jabber, Ruby on Rails, MySql a plus
  
• Strong interest in Twitter and developing a world-class Internet application

This position is full-time in our San Francisco office. It offers a competitive salary commensurate with experience (plus benefits) in a unique company.

We are looking for someone who wants to play a leadership role, solving hard problems on a dynamic team (currently, 10 people). It's sure to be an interesting ride.

Please email people AT obvious.com with a resume.

Everyone knows that Alexa is flawed and you should not depend on them for real data. Nevertheless, Twitter is on the Movers and Shakers list (moving up, that is). We thought that was worth a blog post, at least.

Woot is one of my favorite sites. Not only do they have an awesome
name but every day they post a single item for sale a ridiculously low
price. The item is only available for 24 hours or until it sells out
(which it frequrently does).

So how can you stay on top of the latest phat lewt? With Twitter! A couple days ago, the folks at Woot let us know they were gonna use the Twitter API to let folks know what's for sale that day. As far as we know, Woot is the first to use Twitter like this; as a way to let people keep on top of what's being sold. Very cool.

Now someone needs to get the Nintendo Wii on Twitter so I can find out when I'll finally be able to get one.

Twitter was written about by Eric Gwinn, Chicago Tribune staff reporter along with Tumblr in a piece about short-form social media. He included a nice quote by Twitterer, Dana Power.

World gets 21st Century totem poles: "Dana Power, a computer programmer from Raleigh, N.C., says her brother who lives in Texas introduced her to Twitter so they can stay in touch: 'I hardly ever corresponded with him, but with Twitter, I can see what he is doing at a given point in his life,' she says. 'It makes me feel more connected to him somehow.'"

As folks point out in the comments of the previous post, IM service with Twitter is currently taking a cat-nap. The reason for this again is rapid growth—IM was not made for *that* many friends! Twitter overwhelmed the basic model of instant messaging very quickly so tonight Blaine is going to dream up a more distributed approach to how Twitter interacts over IM. If you are a regular user of Twitter via IM, we just wanted to let you know that it is next in line for better-ification.

The Slowsky commercials Comcastic runs to sell their Internet services are not as funny to us now as they once were. Twitter. Is. Slow. We are painfully aware. The slowness is being caused by massive popularity which makes for a bittersweet type of situation. We thought we'd let you know what we're doing to make things more sweet than bitter.

We did some forensic analysis of our slowness and discovered that API traffic, specifically, XML over our API is HUGE. Really, just totally out of wack. So today, we're separating that traffic from normal web traffic with the goal of caching a whole bunch of the API stuff to make the site snappier. In addition, we are increasing machine power and storage to accommodate our continued growth. However, this will only get us so far.

The short time span between side project and complex scaling challenge caught up with us after our successful sxsw experiment. It was really good timing that our two new full time engineers both arrived at Obvious HQ this week. Beyond that, we have secret weapons in the form of former colleagues who are quite well versed in scaling challenges. Lucky for us, one colleague in particular finds himself in a position to spend time helping us solve this puzzle. Having an extra desk in the office is coming in very handy this week.

Finally, we are thinking big about the future of Twitter with regard to architecture and we're not holding back. We'll have more news about that as we move forward with our plans. Right now, we are digging in and making the site snappy. I'll happily note that while the web part of Twitter has been taking it's sweet time slowsky-style, the SMS part has been humming right along at an increasingly swift hare-like pace.

Well, that's going on our wall of fame. Now we just need a wall of fame. What are people 'twittering' about? by Dan Fost, Chronicle Staff Writer.

A while back we were laughing our butts off at some funny cat pictures and thought we'd use a few as a way to communicate error messages on Twitter.com. Now some folks over on the Twitter Fan Wiki are suggesting more funny cat pictures we could use as error pages. Hopefully we won't need to use them, but just in case, it's good to have some go-to material. Funny!

Laughing Squid: "On the spot we came up with a spontaneous microsponsorship model that ended up providing more than enough beer to make it to closing time. " Read the whole story with photos!

Scripting News: NY Times on Twitter: "Okay, I got the bugs worked out, and it seems to work, fingers crossed, praise Murhpy, I am not a lawyer and I don't work for the NY Times."

Dave put together a neat Twitter API project that sends out just the headlines (with a link) from The New York Times. And, he added, "All the news that's fit to twit." Nice!

There's lots of activity around the Twitter API so we set up a Google Group for discussing various issues. Please do subscribe to Twitter Development Talk if you're working a project involving Twitter and want to be in touch with folks who are doing the same. We'll be in there too!

We totally won the SXSW Web Awards last Sunday! That's me, Jack, Ev, and Jason on stage with Ze Frank. Jack gave our acceptance speech which went exactly like this, "We'd like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!" Then we we walked offstage and partied in Austin. Now we're back in the office making sure we're worthy of the honor. Thanks SXSW! We had a blast.

A bunch of us from Twitter are here in Austin until Tuesday and having a blast. Lots of folks are using Twitter and asking us all kinds of questions. Tonight are the Web awards and we have our fingers crossed! Okay, gotta get back to it. Follow me on Twitter if you wanna see what we're up to!

Unfortunately, it appears that everyone using Gmail got our latest Twitter email update sent directly to their spam folder. Bummer! Anyway, one of the things we said was that if you are going to Austin like us, you can text JOIN SXSW to 40404 to show up on the plasma screens. Please do! Also, here's the rest of the email:

Hey-o, Twitter-ers!

We're getting ready for SXSW! Are you? If you're heading to Austin,
please join us. Text JOIN SXSW to 40404 from your mobile phone and
your updates will be displayed on the high definition plasma
displays in the hallways of the Austin Convention Center. You'll
also get automatically connected to other conference attendees.
It's going to be fun! Not going to Texas? We still love you, come
see us online: http://twitter.com!

Heavy Twitters

We've spotted some interesting new Twitter users 'round these parts.
John Edwards is using Twitter to update from the presidential
campaign trail. We're following this closely because we're
interested in seeing how Twitter plays out in this political
setting. We've also noticed the guys from, A Cursive Memory--an
awesome band we like also heading to Austin. I'm following them
both and it makes for an interesting mix along with my friends.

John Edwards: http://twitter.com/johnedwards
A Cursive Memory: http://twitter.com/acursivememory

Birthdays

Twitter has only been launched publicly for about half a year but
the idea took life March, 13 2006 so we're going to be celebrating
our first birthday! It also happens to be my birthday on March 10th.
We'll be in Austin, so I'm planning on crashing the 8bit party and
pretending that it's all for me. If you're around come say hi to
some of us from Twitter--we might even have a few limited edition
Twitter t-shirts left to give away!

8bit (My Birthday) Party: http://upcoming.org/event/152142

Welcome Britt and Alex

There was this rumor that the two best Rails engineers in the
world (besides the ones already working at Obvious) were living
somewhere in the US. Legend had it that one was in Washington DC
and the other was in Kentucky. We tracked them down and hired
them! They're already working to make Twitter better and they'll
be moving to San Francisco shortly. Welcome, Britt and Alex!

Britt: http://twitter.com/bs
Alex: http://twitter.com/al3x

71Miles.com Launches

One of the super-secret startups sharing office space with Twitter
finally de-cloaked and launched last week. It's called 71miles
because it is the definitive guide to weekend trips around major
cities starting with the San Francisco Bay Area. The suggestions
and reviews are top-notch and the technology-tweaking that these
guys did to build the site is really impressive.

Go Somewhere this Weekend: http://71miles.com

If you do go somewhere this weekend--don't forget to Twitter! Also,
don't forget to check out all the fun widgets, applications, and
other stuff people have built using our API on the Twitter Fan Wiki,
http://twitter.pbwiki.com -- there's some amazing stuff in there.
We've got lots to be happy about, see you in Texas!

Happy Twittering!

Our growth projections were too humble! Things are a bit slow over the web parts of Twitter until we add more dedicated machines—which we are doing right now. Should be all fixed up by this evening.

We printed up a very limited supply of Twitter shirts to bring to SxSW and hand out to folks. Niall scored one 'cause he shares office space with us at Obvious world headquarters.

Liz Lawley is watching Twitter closely.

What Twitter does, in a simple and brilliant way, is to merge a number of interesting trends in social software usage—personal blogging, lightweight presence indicators, and IM status messages—into a fascinating blend of ephemerality and permanence, public and private.

Awesome post!

My cat Bruce hasn't noticed but you may have picked up on some performance issues this week as Twitter acclimates to it's ongoing growth spurt.
Just a little note to let you know that we are *not* lazing around on the job like Bruce. We're engineering ourselves out in front of the wave so we can keep Twitter fast and fun! Also, it's Friday night What are you doing!?