We talk a lot about how Twitter is an amazing real-time platform. The news of the hour, delivered to you within seconds. But while Twitter is always bringing us closer to the present, sometimes our Tweets are a way of looking back to the past. This week’s #OnlyOnTwitter is about looking backwards. We’ve collected musicians’ memories of MCA. We also have a short Twitter essay remembering NFL linebacker Junior Seau. And we have a project developed by NBC LA to live-tweet the Los Angeles riots from 20 years later. All examples of Twitter’s power to make you a part of a global, collective history. And to bring you closer not just to the present, but to the past as well.

Today we were heartbroken to see the news that Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys passed away. The news was shared via Tweets, passed around the world by fans whose lives had been touched by his work. And shortly thereafter came the memories— Tweets about listening to the Beastie Boys, Tweets about meeting “MCA”, Tweets about the impact his music had on all of music that followed. A flow of Tweets in which we were all sharing what this man meant to us as individuals, collectively.

I think this is something important about Twitter. On Twitter our individual memories become a collective history that is more powerful, more meaningful and more instructive than ever before.

RIP MCA
Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys passed away this Friday. Across Twitter, musicians celebrated his work and remembered his impact on their lives and careers.

Remembering Junior Seau
After the suicide of Chargers linebacker Junior Seau, NFL player Eric Olsen remembered him on Twitter.

Re-living the Los Angeles riots
Twenty years ago LA erupted in a firestorm of riots after the Rodney King verdict. This year, NBC LA set up an account to tweet out updates from twenty years ago, exactly how and when they happened. These are excerpts from the first night of rioting.

In order to offer you the simplest and most engaging Twitter experience, we frequently test hundreds of variations of new features and designs with small groups of users. We test everything from subtle tweaks in the language of our sign-up pages and removing the search box from our homepage to big shifts in navigation elements. These experiments help us understand what experiences people like best or use most often. When an experiment ends, we study the results and roll out the most successful variation to everyone as soon as we can.

After recent experimentation, we introduced a slight redesign to every Tweet that flows through your timeline on Twitter.com. A Tweet may be our basic unit of communication, but it also contains a universe: each one has an identity with a username, real name and avatar; a 140-character message that includes text as well as metadata like time and language; some context (replies, favorites and retweets of that Tweet), and perhaps media (photos, videos or links).

Now, when you hover over the newly-redesigned Tweet, you'll always see options to reply, favorite or retweet in the lower-left corner against a grey background.


If the Tweet contains media, you’ll also see specific options like “View photo” or “View video”; otherwise, you’ll see the option to “Expand”. You can expand any Tweet in your timeline to see inline context like favorites or retweets from other people, or additional Tweets from that same conversation. You can also click on any Tweet’s timestamp or “Details” to see that Tweet’s permalink, the unique web page for that Tweet.

We made these changes because this iteration showed a significant increase in engagement, the highest of all the implementations during our experiment. We hope you like this change, which we think makes all of the possible ways to interact with a Tweet more clear. Even more, we hope you don’t mind our ongoing experiments. We’re always curious to find new ways to delight you, and to improve your Twitter experience.

- Othman Laraki, Director (@othman)

There are phrases whose origins fade in the rush of time, and “water cooler moment” is one of those. Apparently first cited c. 1999, it meant a prime-time TV moment that co-workers discussed the next day at the office (presumably with small pointed paper cups in hand).

Flipping forward, Twitter has been increasingly invoked as creating such “must-see” moments for a newer world — in real time, no waiting. This week, on NPR’s flagship show, “All Things Considered,” (@npratc) interviewed former NBC President Warren Littlefield, who reigned during the network’s "Must-See TV" heyday. His new book details that era, and he bemoans the loss of those “water cooler moments” in our multi-channel multiverse where we’re madly and asynchronously watching stuff constantly.

Host Audie Cornish (@nprAudie) felt bemoaning was not in order:

“When I'm watching the Oscars, and everyone is on Twitter…I do feel like I'm having a communal experience with the show — in some cases enjoying it more, because you're having the water cooler conversation at that moment."

"Absolutely. I agree with that", said Mr. L., known on Twitter as @TopOfTheRock_WL.

We’re glad he concurs that Twitter has elevated the water cooler experience into the very fabric of shows. Others are noting this too. Today’s USA Today story quotes Greg Kahn, EVP of Optimedia: “The water cooler used to be the next day, now it's while the show is going on."

And as Philadelphia Inquirer TV critic Ellen Gray (@elgray) notes, Twitter isn’t just for viewers, either: TV showrunners and writers are on Twitter to gauge viewer feedback and try out new material.

This new wave of “Twitter TV” has given us a real driveway moment, as NPR might say — one that’s neatly summed up by Daniel Block (@spacemonkey95):

“So Twitter is the new water-cooler. … Twitter enables a truly communal viewing experience. Like never before it is possible to share a televisual experience with other viewers across the nation. I know of some people who sometimes choose to watch a programme broadcast live, rather than on a catch-up service later, because they want to "join in" on Twitter.”

- Chloe Sladden, VP, Media (@ChloeS)

The Discover tab makes it easy to discover information that matters to you without having to follow additional accounts. Starting today, the Discover tab will begin to surface content that is even more personalized and meaningful to you. We’ve incorporated additional personalization signals to select Discover stories, including Tweets that are popular among the people you follow and the folks they follow.

The Discover tab’s new design shows who tweeted about particular stories. You can click “View Tweets" on any story to see popular Tweets from your network or recent, relevant Tweets directly below the story summary. This social context helps you understand why each story matters to you and makes it easier to join the conversation. You can reply, retweet or favorite these Tweets, or you can “Tweet this story” to share your own perspective.


Over the coming weeks, we’ll be rolling out this redesigned and more personalized Discover experience on Twitter.com, iPhone and Android. This update is part of our ongoing development of Discover; we will continue to work to make discovery on Twitter a magical experience that brings you instantly closer to the information that matters most to you at the right time, any time.

- Satya Patel, VP of Product (@satyap)

Last night’s Latin Billboard Awards proved to be a big night for Latin music’s hottest artists, and for fans on Twitter. The conversation really took off on Twitter, both in Spanish and English -- there were nearly half a million Tweets about the show, which was more than double last year’s volume. Fans particularly turned to Twitter to share their reactions when Don Omar and Man? won trophies, and during Marc Anthony’s Premio Salon de la Fama award tribute, sending thousands of Tweets during those moments.

Before the show started, folks behind the scenes were sharing pictures of the stars as they walked the red carpet:

Fashion cam #billboards @sensato @pitbull @dreateamagency instagr.am/p/J6QB8jDeF0/

— Susan Stipcianos (@DreamTeamSusan) April 27, 2012

A lucky fan in Miami for the Billboards shared the view from her seat during one of the performances:

#Favorite performance of the night!! #Billboards2012 @gerardoortiznet twitter.com/YAREL_RAMOS/st…

— Yarel Ramos (@YAREL_RAMOS) April 27, 2012

Right after taking home an incredible 8 awards, Prince Royce took his acceptance speech to Twitter and made sure to thank his fans around the world:
Prince Royce made sure to thank all his fans:

8 awards @LatinBillboards!!! I am so grateful for all of you guys, my fans!!! Without you this is not possible!! What a night!

— Prince Royce (@PlanetRoyce) April 27, 2012

The team at Trendrr also followed the Latin Billboards closely, and pulled together this infographic showing the way the show played out on Twitter, which you can check out here.

Whether you’re a Latin music lover, an aspiring electronic music producer, or want to re-live rock’s most memorable moments, Twitter is the place for music fans to connect with their favorite artists.

If you post to Twitter, you’re a writer in your own right. While you may not be writing novels, you’re telling your own stories 140 characters at a time. This week on #OnlyOnTwitter we have a number of posts about writers and writing. From authorial Twitter takeovers to crowdsourcing speechwriting to a Twitter staging of a play— it’s everything from 140 characters to 140,000 words in this week’s edition of #OnlyOnTwitter.

Susan Orlean’s crowdsourced commencement speech
Stumped on a commencement speech, author Susan Orlean asked her Twitter followers for help...and tried out a few ideas on them, too.

Anna Quindlen takes @atRandom on tour
Author Anna Quindlen is currently promoting her new book Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake. She took over her publisher’s Twitter account to document one manic day in the life of an author on her book tour.

"Glengarry Glen Ross" Twitter Bot Theater
In a new experiment in the performing arts, Twitter Bot Theater reenacted the movie adaptation of the famous David Mamet play, "Glengarry Glen Ross", by having automated accounts tweet the play line-by-line. Here’s a bit of the scene with Blake, played in the film by Alec Baldwin and played here by @theBlake970. (Don't worry, we picked one of the lines that's not profanity-laden.)

#DontDoubleMyRate
The White House is encouraging Congress to prevent an increase in federal student loan rates— and they deployed a new hashtag to do it. With #DontDoubleMyRate, the White House has encouraged students and college grads to tweet their support. It’s been a pretty successful campaign, helped significantly by the President’s appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

You missed Zac Efron’s party
Actor Zac Efron held a fan chat to promote his new movie "The Lucky One". One unlucky fan wanted to throw a party at Zac’s house and found out he might have missed the boat.

A Twitter-powered game of catch
Colorado Rockies pitcher Jeffrey Guthrie was looking for a throwing partner on a lunch break. Local fan and cancer survivor Woody Roseland just happened to have some free time and a glove.

We love Hack Week so much that we’ve been doing it once a quarter, and this time, the week’s theme was efficiency. For five days, we suspend all but the most critical projects to focus on building out new ideas and tools. Engineers and others from across the company self-organize into teams around whatever projects they’re most passionate about, new and old.

Collectively, we review and vote on our favorites — some hacks make it into product roadmaps, some improve our internal systems, and all of them teach us something about the breadth of what’s possible with a little extra passion and flexibility. People designed everything from a tool to quickly and easily test new features with users to a better way of finding open meeting rooms.

One of the big hits of the week was #CodeClass, an accelerated curriculum on JavaScript and Front-End engineering. Experienced coders from other disciplines learned how to write interfaces for their projects, and beginning coders from every department got started in programming by learning HTML and JavaScript. I was excited to work on it because skills exchange and personal development are such an important part of our culture here — over 150 people signed up for the three different levels, and our video production team even made a very professional promo spot for it:



We’ve already blocked out time for next quarter’s #hackweek, theme TBD. Personally, I plan on ignoring whatever the theme is and running another session of #CodeClass.

- Marcus Phillips, Software Engineer (@mracus)

Today you can download new versions of Twitter for iPhone in the App Store and Twitter for Android in Google Play. These updates make it easier to find out what’s happening on Twitter with improvements to discover, search and notifications.

Discover
The Discover tab helps you find interesting and timely content that matters to you. With this update, you can see Activity on Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android. Activity is a stream of updates that shows which Tweets are favorited or retweeted by the people you follow and which accounts those people follow or add to lists.

Activity appears below the redesigned stories in Discover. Now you can tap any story once to see Tweets about a particular trend or news article. You can then read the entire story or join the conversation by replying, retweeting or favoriting related Tweets.

Search
Search is now simpler in both mobile apps. You can see suggestions for different spellings and related terms for your queries. Finding the people you’re looking for is faster, too. In the Connect tab, you can start typing the first or last name or username of the person you’re looking for and the name will autocomplete for people that you follow.

We’ve also made a few improvements specifically for iPhone: when you tap the search box in Discover, you’ll see your most recent queries. You can also go directly to someone’s profile when searching for a username in Connect.

Notifications
Lastly, we’ve added push notifications for Interactions, so you can know immediately when your Tweets have been retweeted or favorited, or when somebody new follows your account. You can manage your push notifications settings to stay as connected as you’d like.

Download Twitter for iPhone today from the App Store and Twitter for Android in Google Play.

This update was a great collaboration between many teams at Twitter including Android, iOS, Discover, Search and others. Many thanks to everyone who contributed to this effort.

- Sung Hu Kim, Product Manager (@sunghu)

Thursday night, Telemundo is bringing you one of the hottest parties of the year: the Latin Billboard Awards, celebrating the best in Latin music. Whether you’re a fan of pop, tropical, Mexican, or rhythm music, be sure to tune in to watch the performances, cheer the winners and (of course) see what everyone’s wearing. From the minute the red carpet is rolled out, you’ll want to follow the whole fiesta on Twitter.

You can already see the action building now at #Billboards2012:

Mexican superstar Paulina Rubio, winner of many Billboard awards herself, can’t wait to take the stage for her live performance during the show:

Emocionada de ser parte de los premios @LatinBillboards este jueves por @telemundo! No te lo puedes perder!! #billboards2012

— Paulina Rubio (@paurubio) April 23, 2012

“Excited to be part of the @latinbillboard awards this Thursday. Don’t miss it!”

Red carpet host Jorge Bernal has been sharing pictures all week, capturing preparations for the big night. Look like he’s just about ready for the show:

Listos? #billboards2012 instagr.am/p/Jx9qqLnjRu/

— Jorge D. Bernal (@JorgeBernal) April 23, 2012

“Ready?”

And @LatinBillboards lets you know what kind of party you’re in for:

Rehearsals for @Akon just wrapped. Get ready to dance. It's gonna be good #Billboards2012

— Premios Billboard (@LatinBillboards) April 24, 2012

As soon as the limos pull up, the @LatinBillboards team will be providing you with exclusive behind-the-scenes Tweets. They’ll share pictures as the stars arrive — before you can even see them on TV — for those of you who can’t wait to see what everyone’s wearing. As they make their way down the red carpet, some of the biggest names in Latin music will be tweeting their night.

Over at @Telemundo, find out who’s performing next, so you won’t miss your favorite artists. The lineup includes Paulina Rubio (@paurubio), Pitbull (@pitbull), Prince Royce (@PlanetRoyce), and the highly-anticipated Brazilian sensation Michel Tel (@MichelTelo). And @LatinBillboards will capture some of the most emotional moments of the night, with exclusive Tweets and pictures from backstage, catching presenters and performers right before they face the crowd — and winners right after they walk off the stage.

And of course, share your own thoughts as the night unfolds -- remember to include #Billboards2012 and you may even seen your own Tweet on air.

¡Lluvia de estrellas estilo latino!

One of the best things about Twitter is sharing pictures in real-time. Pictures from behind the scenes, pictures from abroad, pictures from the past. This week we have a number of Twitter moments of people sharing experiences and sharing photos in a way that could happen #OnlyOnTwitter. We have DC residents pointing the cameraphones at the sky to snap pictures of a space shuttle’s last flight. We have Jos? Andr?s finding Anthony Bourdain’s favorite restaurant in Singapore and posing with the chef. And we have a Twitter account dedicated entirely to plumbing the depths of the Sports Illustrated photo archives.

All of that and more, happening every day #OnlyOnTwitter.

#spottheshuttle takes over DC
Washington, D.C. residents left their offices in droves this Tuesday to watch the space shuttle Discovery, piggy-backed on a Boeing 747, circled the city three times before landing at Dulles Airport. Thanks to Twitter, even the folks who couldn't leave their desks were able to see the shuttle from just about every angle in the city.

From the vaults of Sports Illustrated
Andy Gray at Sports Illustrated may have the coolest job in the sports world: he gets to dig through the archives of the magazine's photos and share them on Twitter! His is a great feed to follow for any sports fan and a great example of how a publication can creatively use its archives on Twitter.

Jos? Andr?s goes to Singapore
Chef Jos? Andr?s took a trip to Singapore and received some travel recommendations from everybody’s favorite culinary tourist Anthony Bourdain.

NASCAR goes to the White House
The President invited 12 of the top Sprint Cup drivers to the White House. They put on their suits and ties and then shared pictures of the whole event.

Three Stooges answer dozens of questions
In anticipation of opening weekend for #TheThreeStooges @theseanhayes, @DiamantopoulosC and @WillSasso answered questions for fans who want to know Moe.

The lonesome cry of the Canadian penny
When the Canadian government decided to eliminate the Canadian penny, Steve St. Pierre began a Twitter account to tell the other side of the story— from the penny’s perspective. What began as a joke became a movement to donate pennies to charities.

Jim Gaffigan hosts a comedic Q&A
Comedian Jim Gaffigan released a new comedy special called “Mr. Universe” and released it online, directly to his fans. As a part of the promotion for Mr. Universe, he invited questions from his fans on Twitter.

@TwitterMusic interviews artist @KatGraham
Twitter Music conducted an interview with questions tweeted by fans for "Put Your Graffiti On Me" singer Kat Graham.