This had better be a bug (I assume it is though other TC staffers aren’t so sure). If not, this is perhaps the worst UI change I’ve ever seen.

I refuse to believe that Twitter is really trying to add your DM inbox/sent messages, and all those new retweet categories to the main stream like that. Unless they read my post the other day and decided to do the opposite. And what on Earth is up with those numbers? Why the hell do I need numbered tweets in my stream, this is not Sesame Street.

Imaging tech juggernaut Kodak is pretty keen on utilizing social media to connect with current and potential customers, boasting a presence on such sites as Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. The fact that it doesn’t own the @Kodak handle on Twitter hasn’t stopped them from being active on the popular micro-sharing service either, where marketers of the company and many of its international offices share all sorts of Kodak related stuff with their followers.

Of course, it’s only natural for a company like Kodak to share pictures with the community, and if you look closely you’ll see most of the Kodak accounts on Twitter use TweetPhoto to do so (e.g. @JeffreyHayzlett, CMO of Kodak). That’s not a coincidence.

Since Twitter’s inception, SMS (text messages) has been an important and popular way to use the service. For a while last year, it looked like that functionality was slowly going extinct as at one point, only the U.S. and India still had it enabled due to carrier fees. But this year, behind Twitter’s head of mobile, Kevin Thau, SMS has come back with a vengeance, restoring it in places like the UK, and striking new deals in India and Indonesia. And today brings the first of a new type of mobile deal: MMS support for Twitter in the UK.

The deal, announced on the Twitter blog by Thau, allows Orange UK Twitter users to send picture messages to a number (86444) to be posted to their tweet streams. The reason this works is because Orange UK runs a photo site called Snapshot, which will host the pictures and tweet out a link to them automatically.

Perhaps the most annoying thing about Twitter as a platform is that it’s nearly impossible to find people you may know through third party apps. Essentially, you have to know their Twitter handle already to find them, or rely on some other more convoluted method rather than just say, looking them up by name. Soon, that won’t be an issue any more.

As Twitter has posted in its Twitter API Announcements Google Group today, there is now a new Find People API. This will extend the “Find People” capabilities that exist on Twitter.com to third-party developers. Presumably, as with Find People on the site, you’ll be able to search by first names, last names, businesses, and brands, on top of usernames.

Today, Twitter moved into a new, much larger office in San Francisco. The space, which was previously Bebo’s SF office, is right around the corner from their old one.

A few members of the Twitter team spent much of the weekend decorating the new digs with a number of Twitter-themed elements like birds and @ symbols. Check out some of the pictures being posted to the web by Twitter employees below. And yes, there is a DJ booth — and apparently vanity mirrors in the toilet stalls.

President Barack Obama has one of the most popular Twitter accounts with over 2.6 million followers. It should be no real surprise that most of the time it’s not him tweeting from it, instead its various people within the White House communication team that use the account to send out information. And now that he is the President, certainly there are some security concerns with him using something like Twitter. But, did you know that he’s actually never used Twitter at all?

That revelation was made tonight during a Q&A session at a town hall event with Chinese youth that was held in Shanghai this evening (which was streamed live on the web). The President fielded a question about the restricted use of Twitter in China and he had this to say, “I have never used Twitter but I’m an advocate of technology and not restricting internet access.“

Affiliate marketing is 15 years old this month—CyberErotica is said to have launched the first program in 1994. The adult industry has always been ahead of the curve, but I digress. Despite 15 years of existence, which is essentially an eternity in “online years”, the performance based marketing method is still in its infancy. Sure, there are lots of affiliate programs that exist for many online etailers (and other sites that seek sales, leads and visitors) and $2.1b was paid out last year from affiliate programs, but affiliate marketing is still not as easy as it should be for website/blog Publishers to implement and get compensated for their referrals.

For those that don’t know, affiliate marketing works like this—a company with a product or service for sale pays a referral fee to Publishers (marketing companies) that can drive sales, leads, or visitors to them. The Publisher is taking on the risk here—they might be outlaying their own cash on advertising to promote the product/service, or they are linking to that company’s product/service in the content of their site’s own webpages (when they could be linking to another company instead). The Publisher signs up for an account with the affiliate program and is then given “trackable links” to use in their content, which track referrals back to them. Most etailers have an affiliate marketing program in place—for example, Amazon.com’s Associates program will pay 4%-15% referral fees to you when a visitor of your website clicks a link on your site and makes a purchase at Amazon.com.

Twitter & Facebook Turn Everyone Into An Affiliate Marketer

Most recently, it’s not just websites/blogs that are referring sales, but rather individuals themselves, who are using realtime sites like Twitter and Facebook to influence their friends and followers by recommending products to buy, music to listen to, and movies to watch. These realtime discussions are becoming important sources of referral sales and leads for websites—if someone is asking on Twitter what digital camera they should buy, you bet your ass that Amazon.com wants anyone on the Internet responding to that user’s question to be linking to a camera for sale on Amazon.com (and not Walmart.com or BestBuy.com). Amazon.com wants to make sure that those influencers are compensated for referring people to buy from their website, which thus positively reinforces them to continue linking to Amazon.com product pages in the future.

This past summer, Daniel Raffel was desired. Google was pushing hard to hire the product manager, we hear from a source. And there are whispers that Twitter and Facebook were also in pursuit of his services. Basically, it seems like he had his choice of the companies in Silicon Valley that everyone wants to work for. So where did he end up? Yahoo.

Yahoo hasn’t exactly seemed like the ideal place to work over the past couple of years. Besides just the Microsoft acquisition offer distraction (and subsequent search deal), and the CEO shuffle, the company has lost much of its sterling polish that it once had during the dot-com era. But what’s even more odd is that Raffel has worked at Yahoo before. It’s where he made a name for himself by helping to create Yahoo Pipes, the popular content mashup tool. But a few years ago, Raffel took off to work at Pioneers of the Inevitable, where he helped make Songbird, the open source desktop music player.

At the beginning of 2009, during a now-famous strategy meeting, Twitter’s executives asked themselves, “Are we building a new Internet?” At the crux of that question was the realization that Twitter “introduced a new form of communication to the world.” Public micro-messages are now everywhere—on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google, Bing, Yahoo, AIM. They are infiltrating every part of the Web, particularly as the backbone of realtime search.

Yes, status updates (which are a form of micro-message) existed before Twitter, but it is the growing public nature of these messages which makes them exciting. For one thing, they need to be public in order to be visible to search engines. But when Twitter and other companies talk about building a new Internet, they don’t mean that 140-character messages are going to replace web pages. Rather it is that these realtime streams are becoming the center of people’s attention on the Web, and sending them off in all different sorts of directions.

These streams are the new Internet not so much because of the micro-content which they contain, but because they are a more efficient means of communication. Remember, the Internet at its core is a communications system. The battle going on now between Twitter, Facebook, Google, and others is to control this new realtime layer of communications on the Internet. Each one wants to be driving the micro-message bus.

Perhaps the top reason to use Bit.ly (beyond obviously shortening links) is for its analytics. The service makes it easy to see all sorts of data about your short URL links going out to services like Twitter. But sometimes looking at the bigger picture is more interesting than individual data. Now you can see that too.

Today, the service has unveiled its new Bit.ly Click Summary. This is a new page on the site that allows you to see aggregate data for all your Bit.ly links over a set period of time. Currently, this only works for the past 7 days, but Bit.ly says that monthly views will be added soon as well.

Twitter’s official spokesman Mark Logan recorded a video of himself responding to common user complaints about the popular service. In it, the man bluntly tells users that the company doesn’t really care whether you leave or not.

Not to worry, it’s just a spoof video produced by Comedy.com, which is not so surprisingly all about comedy on the net.

Twitter may be having trouble finding new users in the U.S., but its existing users in the U.S. seem to be putting out a majority of the Tweets, which are now averaging 27.3 million a day. According to data provided to us by Pingdom, the pattern of Tweets follows waking hours in the U.S. (see chart), even though comScore data suggests more than half of Twitter’s users are from outside the U.S.

While this data is only a snapshot of the Twitter activity in the three weeks between October 21 and November 11, it does show that the number of messages sent out over the service is approaching a massive scale. Pingdom estimates that the average number of Tweets per hour is 1.1 million, with fluctuations between 567,000 and 1.8 million Tweets per hour over the period Pingdom sampled Twitter’s public timeline. At the current rate, people are sending out 10 billion Tweets a year. It was only last month that the 5 billionth Tweet was sent out.

Did LinkedIn more than double its U.S. visitors in October? A casual glance at the latest comScore data makes it look that way, with LinkedIn shooting up to 20 million unique visitors in October, 2009, from 9 million in September, 2009. The new estimate puts LinkedIn ahead of Twitter, which saw a decline of U.S visitors last month to 19.2 million.

Of course, LinkedIn didn’t really all of a sudden have a growth spurt in October. Rather, comScore was previously under-counting its reach. Now it does a better job of measuring Web usage at work, which apparently is where about half of LinkedIn’s users check in. It makes sense, since LinkedIn is a professional network and you are more likely to be looking for contacts at other companies during work hours.

Ever since last summer, Twitter’s growth in the U.S. has been stalling. But in October, the number of people who visited Twitter.com from the U.S. actually declined for the first time by 8 percent month-over-month. Estimates released today by comScore put Twitter’s domestic unique visitors at 19.2 million, down from 20.9 million in September.

On an annual basis, Twitter is still going gangbusters with 1,271 percent growth from 1.4 million visitors in October, 2008. And on a global basis, it still seems to be chugging away with 58.4 million visitors in September. But a hypergrowth company like Twitter cannot afford to slow down in its home market.

As of next Tuesday, November 17, you’ll be able to access Twitter and Facebook on your Xbox 360. The software update is free, like previous updates, and also includes Last.fm and Zune video compatibility. “What are you doing?” “Losing to 12-year-olds in Modern Warfare 2 over and over again! Not fun.”

The idea, I guess, is that you’ll be able let your friends know just how much fun you’re having while playing the latest game, or streaming the latest Netflix release, without having to go through the trouble of whipping out your phone or walking over to your computer. I see it as a convenience and nothing more. It may also mean that there’s nothing you can to do stop Twitter’s worldwide dominance.

Plenty of people use Twitter to syndicate out their content — like TechCrunch, for example. And often those tweets also are syndicated out to other places — like MySpace, for example. But now you can remove one step in that process if you choose with MyFeedSync for MySpace.

This tool, developed by Egghead Ventures, with the help of developer Sean Percival, who has been advising MySpace recently, uses MySpace ID to sync any RSS feed with your MySpace status. This is similar to the tool that MySpace’s recently announced that syncs your Twitter with your status. But instead of showing a tweet with a Twitter logo, it shows a blog post title with a link, and a RSS logo. This should make it clear to people looking at your profile that you’re highlighting a post of yours rather than just linking to some piece of content you think is cool. The blog URLs are shortened with MySpace’s lnk.ms shortener.

Whether you’re a fan of Twitter’s new list feature or not, it has proven to be a great way to discover people of interest one can mass-follow. But keeping track of Twitter lists can prove cumbersome and overwhelming.

Recently, Listiti launched, combining the concept of Google Alerts with Twitter Lists by sending out e-mail notifications based on the appearance of keywords in tweets from lists you keep track of. This is particularly useful for marketers who’d like to keep track of conversations about a company, product or brand, but only from a specific subset of Twitter users.

Listiti just pushed a new version of the service live, and has added a useful new feature that makes it even more worth checking out: badges.

Despite starting Blogger, Evan Williams rarely blogs. But yesterday, for the first time in several months, he decided to put the digital pen to the digital paper in order to lay out his thoughts for Twitter’s new Retweet functionality. It’s a great view into the mindset behind what is already becoming a controversial change.

Why is there so much controversy? The answer is simple — literally. When Twitter began, you could do one thing on it: Send a blurb about what you were doing in 140 characters or less. This led to an immediate outcry from a wide range of people who thought that it was just about the dumbest service in the world. Others saw the potential behind such a simple service, precisely because it was so simple, and history has proven time and time again that sometimes simple ideas can explode into the biggest ones.

Yahoo seems downright incapable of keeping its best people motivated enough to stay on in Sunnyvale.

The latest person to jump ship is Utkarsh Srivastava, who has resigned from his position as Senior Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research to join micro-sharing sensation Twitter. Louis Gray caught wind of the new hire at Twitter early, keeping tabs on the company’s own Twitter list of employees.

Now Srivastava has confirmed the news by means of, evidently, a tweet.

Back in June, we wrote about Birdfeed, an iPhone Twitter application that finally brought the speed and simplicity to rival what many consider to be the top client, Tweetie. It’s a great app that offers a different look and feel from Tweetie (and especially now Tweetie 2), which some users prefer. And it’s about to gain a key feature which could further differentiate it: Geolocation.

Now, to be clear, as we previewed last month, the upcoming version of Tweetie, 2.1, will also support Twitter’s new geolocation feature. But the new version of Birdfeed, 1.2, does it in a way that highlights it much more. And in fact, when Twitter geolocation support finally does roll out (it’s due very soon, we hear), Birdfeed has a good shot to be the go-to app for it at launch.