When a new user joined Twitter’s microblogging service they are given a set of recommendations that are fairly similar to everyone else’s recommendations, that’s because Twitter has no way of knowing your interests to make better recommendations. Now Twitter is testing a new feature in some countries that dives into your browser history and makes recommendations accordingly.

In a blog post on Thursday Othman Laraki, Twitter’s director of growth and international business wrote:

“After all, even though millions of people love Justin Bieber, FC Barcelona or Kim Kardashian, not everyone using Twitter may want to follow them.”

Twitter buttons and widgets are located on millions of sites which means the company will be able to use data collected from their own pieces of already installed technology to gather information for the recommendation engine.

As Laraki explains:

“By recognizing which accounts are frequently followed by people who visit popular sites, we can recommend those accounts to others who have visited those sites within the last ten days.” read more

Twitter on Thursday gave privacy advocated a big win by announced a new “Do Not Track” setting that allows users to opt out of being tracked by Twitters platform.

The plan was unveiled at an Internet Week panel in New York Thursday morning by chief technology officer for the Federal Trade Commission, Ed Felten.

Twitter also revealed the new Do Not Track button, tweeting:

“The Federal Trade Commission’s CTO, Ed Felten, just mentioned Twitter now supports Do Not Track. We applaud the FTC’s leadership on DNT.”

Users can take advantage of the Do Not Track option using any browser that already support the option. The new feature prevents Twitter from collecting information about users through the use of cookies which are typically placed on a users computer. It should be noted that the Firefox Do Not Track feature only works if websites agree to enable the feature as Twitter has done. read more

Call it an act of hyper-focused marketing, Twitter on Wednesday opened a new office in Detroit, Michigan in order to better serve current and potential marketers, specifically those within the automobile industry.

The new office is being led by Yahoo veteran Greg Myrick and is located in the M@dison Building which is a co-working space located in a 100-year old building. The location is already stock full of several Detroit tech startups and Twitter plans to have a “handful” of employees working out of the location by the end of 2012.

Opening new offices is becoming second nature for Twitter, the social network recently opened locations in Washington, D.C.; Cincinnati, Ohio; Atlanta, Georgia and Austin, Texas while the company’s largest offices are still located in Chicago, New York, Tokyo, London and Dublin. read more

Twitter turned six on Wednesday and to celebrate that special occasion the social network accounts that it was now serving more than 140 million active users.

In a blog post on the company’s website they uses that 140 million mark to show off some other cool facts for example the network now sees more than 340 million tweets each day.

As Twitter puts it:

“That’s more than 1 billion every three days. However concisely, it turns out there’s plenty to say.”

That 140 million user mark is a 40% increase over the company’s 100 million active users mark which Twitter CEO Dick Costolo revealed in September.

At this time Twitter hasn’t revealed how many of those active 140 million users log onto the site each and every day.  read more

Twitter has announced the release of the company’s Promoted Tweets advertising platform for mobile devices.

The new advertising platform joins the Promoted Accounts on users’ mobile devices while advertisers will be able to choose if their Promoted Tweets appear on iOS, Android or other mobile platforms.

Twitter said of the new platform that targeting is:

“Great for brands who want to increase the prominence and reach of their message to a particular type of mobile user. For example, mobile game and app sellers can now pinpoint the users who are likely to purchase their products.”

Promoted Tweets will appear in a users timeline only one time and Twitter says only “relevant” tweets will be shown to mobile users. If you don’t think a promoted tweet is relevant just swipe the timeline and delete it.

Twitter has also noted that as users scroll down the timeline the Promoted Tweets will follow along with them. read more

Twitter has just made a major leap forward in blogging by purchase Posterour, a blogging platform that came out of a 2008 Y Combinator sponsorship.

The platform operates just like WordPress and Tumblr by allowing users to create free blogging accounts which they can then use to post stuff on their “Spaces.”

Posterous has focused on “ease of use” which means an 8-year-old or an 80-year-old can literally figure out the system in no time at all.

On the Twitter blog the acquisition appears to be more of a talent buy:

“Posterous engineers, product managers and others will join our teams working on several key initiatives that will make Twitter even better.” read more

Pinterest may still be invite-only and the two-year-old company might only have 11.7 million active registered users but that hasn’t stopped it from surpassing Twitter as a traffic serving platform for millions of blogs.

According to a recent third-party measurement survey by Shareholic the visually based social networking company is currently receiving help from more than 200,000 online publishers who have implemented the company’s “pin it” buttons on their web properties.

When you consider that Yahoo has over 100 million users the company’s share platform shows the huge potential Pinterest has as a social sharing platform.  read more

Heavy Twitter users should walk away from their computers and other mobile devices and stop staring at tweets all day because it’s bad for you. That was essentially the message delivered by Twitter co-founder Christopher Isaac “Biz” Stone on Wednesday.

It’s not the eye strain, neck strain or other physical ailments that Biz Stone is worried about but rather the fact that people will waste their entire day constantly reading tweets.

Speaking to a business-based audience in Montreal Stone says he initially believed that Twitter would be used as a fun platform for sharing interesting articles and news about a persons day, instead it ended up turning into a social change vehicle such as the so-called Arab spring uprising which brought about pro-democracy movements in the Middle East. read more

465 million. That’s the staggering number of Twitter accounts there are in the world, according to the latest infographic design from Infographic Labs. The infographic takes a look at the current state of things at Twitter, which we can all agree has virtually revolutionized “microblogging”.

Other interesting facts that caught our eye: that celebrity statuses only receive 21% of retweets (“interesting content” leads with 92%), and that there are 11 Twitter accounts created every second. read more

In December 2011 PhoenDog LLC filed a lawsuit against company blogger and Smartphone reviewer Noah Kravitz after he changed the company’s Twitter page to his old name, essentially stealing the websites Twitter followers after leaving the organization. On Wednesday U.S. Magistrate Judge Maria-Elena James said she will allow the case against him to move forward.

In filing a lawsuit against Noah PhoneDog LLC claims he owes them $340,000, the equivalent of $2.50 per follower.

If you’re unfamiliar with the case Kravitz started the Twitter account @Phonedog_Noah while working for several years at PhoneDog, when he left the company in October 2010 he changed the handle to @noahkravitz and kept the 17,000 followers he had amassed during his time at PhoneDog.

Speaking about the courts decision Kravitz’s lawyer Cary Kletter said: read more