I just left the office, at 6am, with most of our engineering and technical operations team. That's only a handful of people, but we were all there all night.

You may have noticed we had an outage last night/stretching into this morning. This was a planned maintenance project, not a surprise happening for us. But we did go far beyond our planned time window, which sucks. What sucks more is the series of outages (planned and not) we've had lately. We know this makes Twitter frustrating to use, and we want you to know, we hear (and share) your frustration and are working really, really hard to fix it.

The good news is we finished a major infrastructure project tonight, which we've been working on for months and that we think is going to help a lot. I'm sure there will be some glitches in the coming weeks, but we've laid some important foundation that's going to help us build toward the future.

Thank you for your support and patience.

Update (8:30a PT): We're still experiencing patches of slowness service-wide. Some of our systems are not cleanly restarting. We're watching closely, bringing things back up manually, and fixing our automation tools accordingly!

We've noticed that people really like to use Twitter during shared events—and not just scary events like earthquakes or presidential campaigns. The Super Bowl is a shared event for an estimated 130-140 million people in the United States. It makes us glad that our trusty infrastructure provider Joyent has us covered with extra capacity—for free!

In fact, throughout our amazing growth, Twitter has relied on Joyent's highly scalable infrastructure. While we're busy building Twitter, Joyent is working tirelessly to bring in more RAM, more CPUs, more hardware, and more late night support—never charging us for bandwidth is worth an extra mention.

The decision to choose Joyent at an early stage was one of the big decisions that contributed to Twitter's success. If you are building a Web app and you need to scale it to Twitter size, Joyent can absolutely help you grow. Thanks Joyent, and go Patriots! (Or Giants, if that's your thing.)

The Chronicle of Higher Education today quotes a university professor on using Twitter to interact with his students,"It was the single thing that changed the classroom dynamics more than anything I’ve ever done teaching," Good stuff.

Technically, most mobile phones are a Twitter Device. But applications built to integrate with Twitter over our API can also be considered devices. Sure you can send and receive Twitter updates over your phone but you can also do that with Facebook. That makes Facebook a Twitter device. (It does other stuff too.)

In fact, there's lots of different devices for Twitter. I just took a glance at the Twitter Fan Wiki apps page and counted well over 200 "devices" you can use to interact with Twitter organized by Windows, Mac, Linux, Multi Platform, Second Life, Web Apps, Search Engines, Email, Widgets, Other, and more. Neat!

Sarah Hatter from lauded software company 37signals emailed to say that "Twitter has become an invaluable tool for us to stay in communication with our customers." The folks at 37signals track public updates for mention of their company or products so they can respond in real-time if necessary.

We're able to see what people are saying about us or our products, and if they report a problem or slowness with Basecamp, immediately twitter them back. If they have contact information on their profile page, we send them a direct email from our support address asking for more info so we can troubleshoot the problem for them. It opens up this whole new level of contact with our customers and we're able to proactively handle support requests within seconds of problems being reported.

During a recent conference co-sponsored by 37signals, Sarah was able to Twitter status updates regarding a sudden service interruption. "If we didn't have the Twitter account, I would have had to sit down and update our status blog by hand, which is totally 2002."

Campaign Reporting in Under 140 Taps

Microjournalism is the latest step in the evolution of Mr. Dickerson, who worked for years at Time magazine, and has moved from print to online articles to blog entries to text messages no longer than 140 characters, or about two sentences. “One of the things we are supposed to do as journalists is take people where they can’t go,” he said in an interview. “It is much more authentic, because it really is from inside the room.”

It's a good thing we made it to the Herbst Theater in San Francisco on time last night because the inaugural award given out by Om Malik at the first annual Crunchies was to Twitter for Best Mobile Startup.

Recognition as a mobile startup is important to us because from our early roots we've been a communication utility over SMS. We added more ways to interact with Twitter but we remain committed and inspired by mobile.

Thank you for considering and voting for Twitter. And huge thanks to the important people represented by the little squares on this page. They are the folks who will help us win "Best Overall" next year!

Twitter has a warm spot for innovative simplicity and an open approach to technology development. We make use of open source software when it makes sense and we think it brings good karma to contribute back to the open source community whenever possible.

However, our open approach is more than just good karma. Twitter, Inc. is committed to building a reliable social messaging utility which people trust enough to use every day. Gaining trust means showing our work. When a technology is shared, conversations and understanding form around it.

Our open approach is very much driven by Twitter engineers like Blaine Cook. Blaine coded the distributed queue server Twitter uses to route vast numbers of messages in the background so front-end response time can remain quick.

Starling is a light-weight persistent queue server that speaks the MemCache protocol. It was built to drive Twitter's backend, and is in production across Twitter's cluster. There's a little more about Starling on the Twitter Developer Blog. And here is the Starling page at RubyForge.

We know there's lots of folks in India who like Twitter. We've already noticed some cricket action and at least one Bollywood movie. We'd like to see more people in India take advantage of Twitter. So, if you have friends or family that live in India (or if you live in India yourself), you can help us spread the word about our India shortcode: 5566511. Using this shortcode means not having to pay international SMS charges when using Twitter from India.

Some Things To Note

SMS messages are limited to 250 per week for folks outside the US. If you come close to the upper limit in a week, we'll let you know in advance. We're also aware of a few wrinkles that have yet to be smoothed out surrounding verification on certain operators. Please let us know how the India shortcode works for you.

It's another month before Apple opens up the iPhone to third-party developers, but until then it's still a great phone on which to use Twitter.  If you've got the new iPhone firmware released yesterday (1.1.3), try adding Twitter or m.twitter.com to your home screen by hitting the plus sign at the bottom of Safari.  You should see a friendly Twitter icon rather than a screenshot.

Despite the fact that Twitter is in English, we continue to see exciting growth from all over the world. Japan, in particular shows a very strong and growing demand for Twitter services. Movatwitter and Twitterpod are great examples.

To support continued growth in Japan, Twitter has formed a partnership with Digital Garage to create the official Twitter Japan service. As part of this arrangement, Digital Garage has made an investment in Twitter, Inc and will commit engineering and other development resources to help us bring Twitter to Japan.

We're really excited about Twitter Japan because it's a big step towards our goal of becoming a worldwide communication network. We'll have more news for you about Twitter Japan and Twitter in other parts of the world as we make progress.

One week ago we announced the hiring of Lee Mighdoll as Vice President of Engineering and Operations. Lee's immediate goal is to help turn Twitter into a reliable communication network that people all over the world can depend on every day.

The challenge facing Lee and our entire Twitter team was highlighted this morning during Steve Jobs' keynote address.

Macworld is only one event, in one city. Twitter must be reliable around the world, around the clock, and it must accommodate all sudden bursts of real-time messages—everything from Apple announcements to natural disasters.

The Twitter Engineering and Operations team is tiny compared to our growth and popularity. In 2008, Lee will be aggressively building a dream team take on the challenge of realizing Twitter's full, global potential. It won't be easy. If you're up for the challenge, please get in touch.

Twitter is currently experiencing some slowness related to the massive number of updates around Steve Job's keynote at MacWorld.  We're working on it and will keep you updated!

Speaking of voting, Twitter was nominated in two categories in the upcoming Crunchies Awards. You can vote until midnight tonight (Pacific time)!

Vote in the mobile category here. And best overall here:

Politweets tracks US presidential candidate popularity by finding and displaying mentions of candidates as they are created on Twitter. The mentions are separated by Democrat on the left and Republican on the right — naturally.

We're proud to announce that Twitter has hired top software industry talent Lee Mighdoll. Lee will lead our growing engineering and operations team here at Twitter HQ. Hiring Lee underscores our commitment to building a world class social messaging utility.

It took a while to find our perfect match. Lee's demonstrated experience creating sophisticated back-end software along with his genuine enthusiasm for building global systems that operate at scale made him an easy choice. His outstanding leadership skills and happy disposition made him a must-have.

Lee is recognized in our industry for his diverse accomplishments at General Magic, Apple, ObjectSpeed, and WebTV. He is named as an inventor on more than a dozen patents, and is a graduate of Brown University. We're excited to have him aboard, here's to an amazing year!

If your plans are going awry due to this big storm we're having in California right now, W. David Stephenson has a tip: "Use Twitter text messages to let all your family and friends — and the world, for that matter — know what’s happening, instead of making voice calls on your cell phone."

I just wanted to tell you how fabulous Twitter has been for our team! Not only have we cut our email time in half, but more importantly, our business is getting a super unique feel that we didn’t quite have before…a little more chummy, a little more in touch, and let me tell you, there’s a whole lot of idea blasts going on! Thanks a TON for putting such a unique and relevant solution out there! It’s like you figured out a way to puree accountability, self-startedness and teamwork for idea sharing and came out with a bonus of camaraderie froth. Twitter: For us, it’s like talking with your teammates, without the neck breathing of asking them “What’s going on?” yourself!

Thanks, Samara!

Do you use Twitter at work? How?