Last week, we announced an easy-to-install and lightweight Tweet Button that allows publishers to make it easy for users to share a link to their content on Twitter. Thousands of sites have implemented the Tweet Button already.

But what if you go to a site that doesn’t have a Tweet Button? Have no fear. Today, we’re making available a Tweet Button Bookmarklet that allows you to tweet a link with your own commentary from anywhere on the web. You just need to drag and drop the Bookmarklet into your browser’s bookmark bar.

Like the Tweet Button, it shortens links automatically. If there’s a Twitter account listed on the site, it also may suggest users to follow. To install the Bookmarklet, visit this page and drag the “Share on Twitter” link to your bookmark bar on any browser.

Today we’re launching Twitter Tales - a growing set of articles that highlights creative individuals and businesses from all corners of the world that help make Twitter awesome. The examples of great Twitter use will also likely inspire others to use the service in innovative and interesting ways.

For the next several weeks, we’ll add a new story to the Twitter Tales homepage that you can access by clicking on the Twitter Tales icon on the sidebar of the Twitter Blog. Today, we’re sharing three entries about:

- Life: @natashabadhwar is a mother/filmmaker/photographer/writer from New Delhi who sees Twitter as a form of self therapy
- Community: @caltrain is a crowd-sourced Twitter account where people can help others avoid pitfalls on their daily commute
- Humor: @thebloggess provides a witty and honest behind the scenes look into her blog writing

Do you have a tale to tell? Tell us who you are and share more information by emailing tales@twitter.com.

Twitter is great for sharing interesting things you find on the web. In fact, close to a quarter of all Tweets include a link in them. Despite the high volume of sharing, there is plenty of room to make it easier. Copying and pasting, link shortening, and bouncing between browser tabs just to share a link in a Tweet is too much work.

Today we’re launching the Tweet Button to make sharing simple. It lets you share links directly from the page you’re on. When you click on the Tweet Button, a Tweet box will appear -- pre-populated with a shortened link that points to the item that you’re sharing.



After you post to Twitter, you may see suggestions for accounts to follow. These accounts are suggested by the web site you visited and may include, for example, the news outlet and reporter of the article you shared.

Check out our video, and try out the button at the bottom of this post!



The Tweet Button is not only simple for users, but for publishers of all sizes, too. Recreational bloggers to large media companies can quickly and easily add the Tweet Button to their sites. It only takes a few lines of code. The Tweet Button will help publishers grow traffic and increase their Twitter following.

You may have seen similar buttons on blogs, news sites and other places that let you share content on Twitter. These have been created by third parties. Most notably, a company called TweetMeme created a popular “retweet button” for publishers. They’ve already made it easier to share links on Twitter and have helped a tremendous number of publishers get their content into Twitter. We’re pleased to be working closely with the good folks at TweetMeme and, from here on out, they will be pointing to the Twitter Tweet Button. Check out TweetMeme’s blog to learn more about what they’re up to next.

Starting today, the following sites will use the Tweet Button. All of them integrated this in less than one week.

AddThis
Arizona Republic/azcentral.com
Ask.com
CBS Interactive
CNN.com
Cracked.com
Detroit Free Press
eHow.com
Eventbrite
Gawker Media
HuffingtonPost.com
Hulu
LIVESTRONG.com
Redfin
SFGate.com
ShareThis
Sky News
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The Des Moines Register
The Indianapolis Star
The Onion
The Tennessean
Threadless
TIME.com
TV Guide
USA TODAY
WordPress.com
WUSA 9
Yardbarker
YouTube

Our guess is that more than a few sites will join the above in the hours to come. Get the Tweet Button for your website today and let the sharing begin.

We’ve always been big fans of trusty SMS messaging. In fact, sending a text was originally the only way users could tweet. This is why Tweets are 140 characters -- they need to fit into a text message.

We value SMS because it’s simple, instant and universal. Recently, we’ve added a few new features to make Twitter even more useful with SMS.

Fast Follow. Anyone in the US can receive Tweets on their phone even if they haven’t signed up for Twitter. This is a simple way for people to get information they care about in real-time. For example, let’s say you want to get Tweets from New York City’s office of emergency management (@NotifyNYC). Just text ‘follow NotifyNYC’ to 40404 in the US.


Try it out the next time you see a Twitter @username at a restaurant or store, on a billboard or on TV, or if you hear one mentioned on the radio. If you want to appear in a user’s followers list or start to get followers, you’ll need to create a Twitter account. You can SMS by texting ‘signup’ to Twitter.

Fast Following without creating an account is currently available only in the US, but we're working with carriers to bring it to other countries.

Set SMS alerts: From your computer, wherever you see a user on Twitter.com, you can hover over their name or avatar, and click on the phone icon that appears in the hovercard. Whenever they tweet, you'll get it as an SMS message on your phone.


It's just as easy to set alerts from your phone. Send ‘on [username]’ or ‘off [username]’ to 40404 in the US. (Tip: Check our list of numbers for each country and add the Twitter number to your address book.)

Tell Twitter to be quiet. Turn text messages on or off by sending ‘on’ or ‘off’ to Twitter. You can also go to our settings page if you want to turn off text message updates during a certain time period.

Keep up with the latest Tweet. If you text 'Get [username]’, that user’s most recent Tweet will be sent to your phone, even if you don’t follow them. There are a bunch of other fun commands you can use with Twitter on your phone.

Follow @twittermobile to keep up with the latest mobile developments.

Text on!

With more than a hundred million users on Twitter, there are sure to be at least dozens of accounts out there that will reflect your interests. The trouble is finding all of them. Today we're beginning to roll out a simple, but powerful new feature to help address that -- "Suggestions for You". The algorithms in this feature, built by our user relevance team, suggest people you don’t currently follow that you may find interesting. The suggestions are based on several factors, including people you follow and the people they follow. You'll see these suggestions on Twitter.com and the Find People section. If you like a suggestion, click "follow"; if you don't, click "hide," and we’ll try not to suggest that user again.



In addition, you will begin to see recommendations for similar users when you view another account’s profile. If you’re interested in a particular user, you might be interested in these other accounts as well.

All these features will be available for developers, too. We will be launching an API so third parties can provide these suggestion features in your favorite desktop, mobile, and web applications, too.

Now, go find somebody new to follow. You never know what you might discover...

When you can’t update your profile photo, send a Tweet, or even sign on to Twitter, it’s frustrating. We know that, and we’ve had too many of these issues recently.

As we said last month, we are working on long-term solutions to make Twitter a more reliable and stable platform. It’s our number one priority. The bulk of our engineering efforts are currently focused on this issue, and we have moved resources from other projects to focus on it.

For much more background, J.P. Cozzatti from our engineering team discusses our efforts and recent issues today in a post on the Twitter Engineering blog. In a separate, but closely related post on the Engineering blog, we discuss something we’ve been working toward for some time: We’re moving into our own dedicated data center this fall. This will be a big step forward.

We posted last Friday about the Tweets-per-second (TPS) counts we saw during the first week of the World Cup and the record TPS seen at the end of the NBA Championship game. The second week of the World Cup continued to see consistent spikes in TPS after goals that are remarkable increases over our average of 750 TPS. However, we caution to call any goals a record this week both because many of the games were played simultaneously with another one and total numbers were fairly similar to the first week when only one game was being played at a time.

However, we are calling the end of Japan's 3-1 victory over Denmark a record that bests the end of the Los Angeles Laker victory over the Boston Celtics (3,085 TPS). When the referee blew the final whistle, we saw 3,283 TPS. (The Netherlands/Cameroon game ended six minutes earlier.)

Early in 2009, when Twitter employed less than 50 people, we faced two different security incidents that impacted a small number of users. Put simply, we were the victim of an attack and user accounts were improperly accessed. There were 45 accounts accessed in a January incident and 10 that April for short periods of time. In the first incident, unauthorized joke tweets were made from nine accounts and attackers may have accessed nonpublic information such as email addresses and mobile phone numbers. In the second, nonpublic information was accessible and at least one user’s password was reset.

Within hours of the January breach, we closed the security hole and notified affected account holders. We posted a blog post about it on the same day. In the April incident, within less than 18 minutes of the hack we removed administrative access to the hacker and we quickly notified affected users. We also posted this blog item about the incident within a few days of first learning about it.

Why are we bringing up these incidents from 18 and 14 months ago that we already told people about? Because the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched an inquiry into our security practices related to these attacks and today announced that we've reached an agreement that resolves their concerns. Even before the agreement, we'd implemented many of the FTC's suggestions and the agreement formalizes our commitment to those security practices.