Today, we’re taking an important step to make it easier to manage the security of your Twitter experience – we are adding a user setting that lets you always use HTTPS when accessing Twitter.com. Using HTTPS for your favorite Internet services is particularly important when using them over unsecured WiFi connections.

For some time, users have been able to use Twitter via HTTPS by going to https://twitter.com. We’ve made it simpler for users to do this by adding the option to always use HTTPS.

To turn on HTTPS, go to your settings and check the box next to “Always use HTTPS,” which is at the bottom of the page. This will improve the security of your account and better protect your information if you’re using Twitter over an unsecured Internet connection, like a public WiFi network, where someone may be able to eavesdrop on your site activity. In the future, we hope to make HTTPS the default setting.


We’ve already made this setting the default for a number of clients and activities. In these cases, HTTPS is used whether or not you’ve enabled the “Always use HTTPS” setting:

• When you log into Twitter, so your password stays protected.
• On the official Twitter for iPhone and iPad mobile application.

There are also a few instances where turning on HTTPS in your settings does not force HTTPS. For example, when accessing Twitter from your mobile browser, you need to go to https://mobile.twitter.com to use HTTPS for now. We are working on a solution that will share the “Always use HTTPS” setting across twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com, so you don’t have to think about which device you’re using when you want to check Twitter. If you use a third-party application, you should check to see if that app offers HTTPS.

Five years ago this week, a small team of people started working on a prototype of the service that we now know as Twitter. On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey (@jack) sent the first Tweet.

Today, on every measure of growth and engagement, Twitter is growing at a record pace. Here are some numbers:

#tweets

• 3 years, 2 months and 1 day. The time it took from the first Tweet to the billionth Tweet.
• 1 week. The time it now takes for users to send a billion Tweets.
• 50 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, one year ago.
• 140 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, in the last month.
• 177 million. Tweets sent on March 11, 2011.
• 456. Tweets per second (TPS) when Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009 (a record at that time).
• 6,939. Current TPS record, set 4 seconds after midnight in Japan on New Year’s Day.

#accounts

• 572,000. Number of new accounts created on March 12, 2011.
• 460,000. Average number of new accounts per day over the last month.
• 182%. Increase in number of mobile users over the past year.

#employees

• 8. 29. 130. 350. 400. Number of Twitter employees in Jan 2008, Jan 2009, Jan 2010, Jan 2011 and today.

Our thoughts, sympathy, and support go out to those in Japan affected by Friday’s powerful earthquake and resulting tsunami.

On our Twitter Japan blog, we share tips and resources to help people around the world provide support and share and follow important information. The post is in both Japanese and English. In it you can find which hashtags people are using to communicate about the earthquake, learn about a new section of our mobile website (available for users in Japan) that has the latest information about the earthquake, and discover useful message boards and other sites. We'll be updating this blog post as we discover more tools and useful information.

Yesterday, we also posted additional information on how to help people in Japan and accounts to follow to stay up-to-date on what's going on in Japan on our Hope 140 blog.

Twitter for iPhone is already the third-most popular way to access Twitter (after Twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com) and our official iPad app is the top way for people to connect with Twitter on Apple’s tablet. Today, we introduced a handful of new features that make them even better.

These include:

- Photos. Uploading photos is now easier than ever. There’s a camera button in the toolbar and we improved the image preview, so you can quickly choose a photo from your library or take a new picture.
- Follow your friends. Now you can find which of your friends are on Twitter that have chosen to be discoverable through the contacts on your phone.
- Local trends. See trends based on your location.
- Shorten links. When you want to share a link on Twitter, just paste it into the Tweet box and we’ll automatically shorten it.
- Tweet box design. We redesigned the “New Tweet” screen so it’s now cleaner and simpler.
- Autocomplete. When tweeting on-the-go, speed and accuracy are important. Autocomplete for @usernames and hashtags help you tweet faster
- Direct Messages. The new Direct Message conversation view helps you better keep track of messages.



And one very cool update is iPhone specific – for now. We’ve introduced the Quick Bar that lets you quickly see trends at the top of your timeline. You can swipe the Quick Bar to the left or right to see additional trends.

You can download Twitter on your iPhone or iPad from the iTunes App Store, or visit twitter.com/download.

Today we're announcing a product that is a major step toward making Twitter more easily accessible by people around the world - the Twitter Translation Center. The Translation Center allows us to crowdsource translations from our passionate users in order to more quickly launch Twitter in additional languages.

Translators will be translating the product itself, not the Tweets. If you go to the settings page on Twitter.com and change your language, you’ll see what we mean.

We currently offer Twitter in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. These languages are all included in the Translation Center so translators can continue to help us with updates. We’ve also added Indonesian, Russian and Turkish to the Translation Center, as Twitter will be translated to those languages next. We plan to introduce more languages throughout the year, such as Portuguese.

Crowdsourcing translations isn’t new for us. Since October, 2009, we’ve counted on Twitter users to volunteer as translators and help us localize Twitter. For this launch, we created a completely new system, based on feedback from translators, to improve the translation experience.


How does it work?
The new Translation Center allows any Twitter user to sign up, choose a language and begin translating immediately. Translators can now help localize twitter.com, mobile.twitter.com, Twitter for iPhone and iPad, Twitter for Android, Twitter Help and the Twitter Business Center. We also improved the Center’s search functionality, added phrase tagging, created special translator profiles, enabled commenting on phrases and much more.

At this time, we have opened up the Translation Center to users who speak French, Indonesian, Italian, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. If you speak any of these languages, you can start helping us translate! Head over to twitter.com/translate and follow @translator for the latest updates.

Twitter for Android is one of the fastest growing Twitter applications. Six months ago, it wasn’t among the top 10 most-used Twitter applications. However, in the last two months, usage has doubled, and now it’s among the top five – along with twitter.com, m.twitter.com (our mobile web site), Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Blackberry.

Today, we’re launching a new version of Twitter for Android. It looks and feels more like our other official Twitter applications and provides a more consistent experience across platforms and devices.

Use Twitter without signing in
You can use Twitter for Android even if you haven’t signed in or don’t have an account. You can view trends, browse your interests and see suggested users in several categories, including fashion, entertainment and travel, or search to find out what people are saying about topics you care about, such as big sporting events. You can now also sign up for Twitter from within the app.


Design
We made some significant changes in the design of the new app. When you first sign in, you’ll see your timeline, along with icons along the top that let you view @mentions, messages, and lists. This layout makes it fast and simple to navigate Twitter on your Android device. Also, the @mentions tab now includes Retweets; seeing replies and Retweets in one place offers a quick way to better understand which Tweets are sparking interest and engagement. In addition, we introduced auto-complete for usernames.


Search
We’ve also introduced universal search to this version of Twitter for Android. This means that when you search, you can find Tweets with the term you’re looking for, Tweets sent by people near your location, or people whose user names include that term.

For example, let’s say you want to search for “packers". As you type “packers” in the search box, you’ll see the following suggestions:

• search packers: this will return Tweets that include the word “packers”
• search packers nearby: this will return Tweets that include the word “packers” and are sent by nearby users
• search packers in people: this will return accounts that have “packers” in the name
• @packers: this option will skip search results and take you directly to the account, if it exists (in this example, it does)

And, last but not least, at the bottom of the search section is one of my favorite new features: you can scan your address book to find which of your friends, who have chosen to be discoverable, are also on Twitter. New users will get a chance to do this when they first go through the sign-up process on the app.

You can download Twitter for Android from Android Market on devices with Android 2.1 or higher.

A record 162.9 million people watched this year’s Super Bowl, making it the most-watched television event ever.

The big event had its own Twitter record, too. If you tweeted at 10:07:16pm EST, you helped set a new Twitter record: during the final moments of the game, fans sent 4,064 Tweets per second (TPS) – the highest TPS for any sporting event. That spike shattered the previous record in the sporting world: the 3,283 TPS sent during Japan’s 3-1 victory over Denmark during last summer’s World Cup. In fact, Twitter users shattered that record six times over the course of the game – including early touchdowns by the Packers and Steelers and throughout the halftime show. (Still, all of this Super Bowl tweeting wasn’t enough to top the all-time record of 6,939 TPS, set just after midnight in Japan on New Year’s eve.)

The surprise winner of the Super Bowl? Usher (@UsherRaymondIV). His sudden appearance during the Black Eyed Peas’ (@bep) halftime show performance created the second largest peak in Tweets during the game. Plus, the continued talk about him made him the most talked about person during the Super Bowl. The Peas were next on the list of most-discussed people, followed by Slash, Eminem, and Christina Aguilera. Aaron Rodgers, the most mentioned player, was sixth.

So which commercials and brands were people talking about most during the game? Doritos, whose "Pug Attack" commercial was a popular favorite, was this year’s champion. Audi and Pepsi took a close second and third, followed by Chevy, Coca-Cola and Groupon.

Our goal is to instantly connect people everywhere to what is most meaningful to them. For this to happen, freedom of expression is essential. Some Tweets may facilitate positive change in a repressed country, some make us laugh, some make us think, some downright anger a vast majority of users. We don't always agree with the things people choose to tweet, but we keep the information flowing irrespective of any view we may have about the content.