Here is a cool video from Ben, an engineer at twitter who posted on the new twitter engineering blog. 

"I ran Code Swarm over a few essential production apps. Icons represent developers, and particles represent files added or modified. It doesn't cover prototypes or contributions to open source, so it isn't exactly scientific, but it still goes to show Twitter's explosive growth mirrored in engineering."

Twitter has just announced on their Engineering Blog that they have "extracted the code we use to handle Tweet-specific elements and released it as an open source library".

From their blog:

How do you handle a Twitter friend who just won't shut up? Although we're usually happy to listen to what our Twitter friends have to say, sometimes they can go a little bit over the top. One particular Twitter friend of mine, with whom I consider myself to have a fairly close Twitter relationship, has begun to have long, drawn-out political arguments via Twitter which often span hundreds of tweets and include dozens of retweets, personal insults at other Twitter users, and so on. Although in the past I've been happy to engage in conversation with him, he's begun to seriously pollute...

Twitter made a ripple among Twitter application developers when they announced this week the first ever official Twitter conference especially for developers, which they're calling Chirp. The conference is intended to give Twitter application developers a place where they can get together to discuss the best practices for Twitter application development, share ideas and inspirations, and most importantly - network.

Kim Kardashian made Twitter headlines last month when it was revealed by ad.ly co-founder that Kim Kardashian earns $10,000 per tweet using the Twitter advertising network, which pays Twitter users to sponsor advertisements within their tweets. The ad network allows Kardashian to tweet just one ad per day, meaning that if she tweets ads once daily for a year, she’ll be earning over three and a half million dollars from her use of Twitter. That price is clearly based on the number of followers Kardashian has, which at this point numbers almost three million. But are her tweets really...

Following on last week's big announcement that Twitter was changing their suggested users system in order to give new users a more topical list of users to follow when they sign up, Twitter announced this week yet another major enhancement to the microblogging platform – localized trending topics.

The power of suggestion is an amazing thing.

The first thing that new Twitter users encounter on the microblogging platform has traditionally been a list of "suggested users" - twenty users that Twitter has handpicked as being "interesting people to follow" and, they've always maintained, a good group of people to start out following on Twitter.

There are many problems with that system of suggested users. The list of suggested users is mostly comprised of celebrities, and most of them don't do much in the way of engaging in active conversation. They tend to treat Twitter as a...

If you've been watching Twitter closely, you've probably noticed that Twitter spam isn't quite as bad as it used to be. Since the company launched serious anti-spam features that help users identify and report spammers, the folks over at the world's largest microblogging platform have been working overtime to flag and remove spammy accounts. That being said, let's be frank - the problem of Twitter spam remains just that: a problem.

We've seen spam in all flavors and colors, and we've managed to narrow the problem down to the five nastiest flavors of Twitter spam....

Well, you can go ahead and add another item to the list of things you can do on Twitter that will get you into trouble: Twittering a bomb joke, apparently.

At least, that's what Paul Chambers discovered after he made a joke on January 6th about the closing of his local airport, Robin Hood Airport, due to snow. Chambers was slated to fly to Ireland on January 16th and was concerned about the airport's closing.

"Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!"

Chambers thought nothing of it after...