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News

• Twitter again apologises for outages, bugs

  The string of outages, malfunctions and bugs that have hobbled Twitter for the past week and a half prompted the company to issue another apology and explanation for its technical woes on Tuesday afternoon.

• Twitter service disruptions and outages persist

  Twitter's persistent and disruptive service outages have entered a second week, as the company scrambles to bring its site availability back to acceptable levels.

• Twitter buys analytics company

  Twitter, which recently announced its Promoted Tweets advertising program, has acquired the maker of a cloud-hosted Web analytics application, Twitter said Thursday.

• Twitter tests URL shortening feature

  Twitter is testing a feature intended to make it more convenient and secure for end users to include shortened Web addresses, or URLs, in messages they post via the popular microblogging service and via its third-party applications.

• Twitter confirms beta testing of new business features

  Twitter Tuesday confirmed that it is working on new features designed to help companies use the microblogging site to grow their business.

• Twitter wipes out followers to kill bug

  For all the Twitterers who were fretting about where their followers went earlier today, fear not. They're back.

• Twitter acquires SMS specialist

  Twitter has acquired Cloudhopper, a provider of mobile phone text messaging infrastructure. Twitter hopes to use the company's expertise to improve the scalability and reach of its SMS (Short Message Service) service, according to a Twitter blog post.

• Twitter to start pushing advertising to users

  Twitter on Tuesday introduced a new service called Promoted Tweets, which will let companies send ads in the form of ordinary messages, according to a blog posted by co-founder Biz Stone.

• Twitter says growth surging internationally

  More people outside of the U.S. have registered for Twitter accounts than people in the U.S., the company said on Thursday.

• Analysis questions threat posed by URL shorteners

  Concern over the danger of shortened URLs may be overblown, according to a report released on Wednesday by a researcher with security firm Zscaler.
  Further, a New Zealand-made URL shortener cited as contributing to the problem in late February appears nowhere in Zscaler's analysis

• Twitter's @anywhere could usher in big improvements

  Many South by Southwest attendees reportedly walked out halfway through the keynote appearance by Twitter CEO Evan Williams this week citing boredom, but the announcement he made on stage deserves careful attention, according to industry experts.

• Twitter to simplify integration of 'tweets' into websites

  Twitter plans to launch a new platform that lets web publishers display 'tweets' on their sites more broadly and easily than is possible today via the company's APIs (application programming interfaces).

• Twitter wants to know where you are

  Twitter knows where you are -- at least in the U.S.
  

• Only 21 percent of Twitter members are active, report says

  A study released today supports the oft stated notion that most of Twitter's 75 million registered users are less than committed to the microblogging site.

• Twitter tipped to put ads in search field

  Micro-blogging service Twitter is thought to be preparing to serve advertisements to its users.