8 Twitter Facts You May Not Know

PCMag.Com - Twitter is an enigma. It's a relatively simple publishing service built initially on the SMS backbone that has grown into something of a world-wide phenomenon. Over 300 million people around the world use it, and many millions of them live their lives out loud on the service.

I'm a dedicated member and somewhat obsessive Tweeter. As such, I thought I knew and understood the service. Yet, even I learned something last week when Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and Founder Jack Dorsey each sat down with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at All Things Digital's D9 conference in southern California. Both described a vibrant service, with a network of connected services generating billions of API requests every single day. At the same time, roughly 50 percent of Twitter access is now coming through Twitter.com, a shift that must please Twitter. Here are some key takeaways from the two Twitter-centric chats.

You Own the Photos

Any photo you post via Twitter's new photo service is, according to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, yours and yours alone (just like your Tweets). This is much like other Twitter photos services, such as TwitPic and Yfrog. Each of them, though, reserves the right to redistribute the content you supposedly own. By the way, Mark Zuckerberg can rest easy. Costolo sees no overlap between Twitter photos and the photo albums in Facebook. In fact, the services are apparently not even looking at the same time frame. There are no albums in Twitter's Photobucket-hosted photo service, and while you could go back and view all the photos posted in a Facebook account, Twitter's photo stream will be somewhat more limited. As Costolo put it, "Twitter's past tense is much shorter than other services' past tense."

Twitter Doesn't Want to Kill All Third-Party Services

This is one bit of news I'll take with a grain of salt, but according to Twitter's CEO, Twitter would prefer that all those services accessing Twitter's APIs move into what they call "value-added services." In other words, stay out of Twitter client building because Twitter has that covered.

Twitter Will Build out More Services

Twitter just introduced a photo-sharing service, which puts competitive services on notice. Twitter's Costolo readily acknowledges that much of what Twitter will develop will overlap with services from third-party products. Sorry, does that obviate our previous "fact?"

 

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