Newsworthy, funny, interesting, or important—tweets find their way into our lives more and more. Sawhorse Media is organizing the second annual Shorty Awards as a fun way to show appreciation to the people behind the tweets we read every day. Voting has opened in 27 official categories with room for more at your suggestion. An awards ceremony, complete with 140-character acceptance speeches, will be held in March in New York City and live streamed on the web. Check out the official rules to learn how to vote.

When Twitter announced The Fledgling Initiative in October—making and selling wine to benefit an organization called Room to Read, I was thrilled. This past month, my enthusiasm and commitment increased dramatically when I had the chance to visit some of the sites where Room to Read works in India.

Teachers and students in Hardiwar gave me the warmest of welcomes. I was given the opportunity to help children read books in English and one group of students even inited me to sing a song for them. My performance of Itsy Bitsy Spider (see above—pit stains included), sent the kids into fits of laughter.

The schools in these areas face incredible obstacles but the community approaches problems with passion and vigor. One school was having trouble with a dangerous elephant so parents volunteered to take turns walking the kids to school and would even sleep there for a night or two. When I was little there were snow days but nothing like this.

Seeing kids get excited about learning to read made my heart skip a few beats, and made me feel proud to work at a company that chooses to partner with world-changing organizations like Room to Read. Here are some of the photos from my trip and you can learn more about Room to Read at their web site.

The promise of technology is to help people help themselves. At Twitter, we are united in our belief that software has the ability to augment humanity in productive and meaningful ways. For us, it has been a year during which we realized that no matter how sophisticated the algorithms get, no matter how many machines we add to the network, our work is not about the triumph of technology, it is about the triumph of humanity. Thank you to The Sunday Times for publishing my look back at 2009, "Why we can never rest: a year in the life of Twitter." We're looking forward to another intense yet gratifying year reminding us why we find it meaningful to develop ways for people to express themselves and communicate openly.

In August, we previewed expanded location support for developers. Last month we launched our Geotagging API with support from several of the top Twitter clients. When current location is added to tweets, new and valuable services emerge—everything from breaking news to finding friends or local businesses can be dramatically enhanced. Our efforts in this area have just begun. Today, we're excited to announce a major new step into the location-aware future. Twitter has acquired Mixer Labs, creators of GeoAPI.

The Mixer Labs crew has been working on harnessing the power of local information for a couple years and just recently launched GeoAPI, a comprehensive service for helping developers build geolocation-aware applications. As of today, they're part of Twitter and will be working to combine the contextual relevance of location to tweets. We want to know What's happening?, and more precisely, Where is it happening? As a dramatic example, twittering "Earthquake!" alone is not as informative as "Earthquake!" coupled with your current location.

We will be looking at how to integrate the work Mixer Labs has done with the Twitter API in useful ways that give developers behind geo-enabled apps like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and others powerful new possibilities. We look forward to building features together that will make Twitter even more interesting and relevant to your daily life, no matter where you are. Please join us in welcoming this fine new crew to Twitter Headquarters—795 Folsom St, San Francisco, CA.

Today we have launched Twitter SMS in Australia with our partner Telstra. As always, it is free to receive notifications and standard text messaging rates apply to sending. It's the same pricing as sending and receiving text messages from friends. Give it a try by sending "START" to 0198089488. Once you have your phone associated with your Twitter account try following @Telstra by sending "FOLLOW Telstra" to 0198089488. Or follow one of these popular accounts via SMS by sending "FOLLOW" and the username.

Domain Name System or DNS is an Internet protocol used to translate IP addresses into domain names so instead of typing in a long string of numbers we can enter urls like www.twitter.com into a browser to visit our favorite web sites. Last night, DNS settings for the Twitter web site were hijacked. From 9:46pm to 11pm PST, approximately 80% of Traffic to Twitter.com was redirected to other web sites. We tweeted, blogged, and updated our status page last night.

During the attack, we were in direct contact with our DNS provider, Dynect. We worked closely to reset our DNS as quickly as possible. The motive for this attack appears to have been focused on defacing our site, not aimed at users—we don't believe any accounts were compromised. If you're concerned that your account could have been affected in some way, feel free to contact us, accountsafe [at] twitter.com.

As we tweeted a bit ago, Twitter's DNS records were temporarily compromised tonight but have now been fixed. As some noticed, Twitter.com was redirected for a while but API and platform applications were working. We will update with more information and details once we've investigated more fully.

They both have carriers that launched Twitter's Text Messaging service today. We are excited to announce that our friends at 3 Indonesia and O2 Ireland have both made the Twitter SMS service available to their subscribers without any additional fees. Sending and receiving text messages with Twitter is just like sending and receiving them with your friends. It's a simple way to tell the world what's happening while out and about by quickly sending a text message to Twitter. Additionally, users can turn on text notifications for individual people they follow as well as, direct messages.

Customers of 3 Indonesia have exciting additional functionality available. 3 is the first carrier in Indonesia to support sending photos to Twitter via MMS by incorporating TwitPic. Give it a try today on your 3 Indonesia phone by sending "START" to 89887.

O2 is the first carrier to launch Twitter SMS in Ireland so, if you are a lucky O2 Ireland customer send "START" to 51210 and either sign up for Twitter or activate your phone with your current Twitter username. Also, be sure to check out all of the cool commands we support.

More countries and carriers are coming soon. Check here to see which countries and carriers currently support Twitter Text Messaging.

Deutsch ist eine der weitverbreitetsten Sprachen der EU und ist die letzte Sprache, die wir im Jahr 2009 auf Twitter.com einführen.

Mit der unentbehrlichen Hilfe unserer vielen fantastischen Übersetzer und Übersetzerinnen, haben wir fünf neue Sprachen in weniger als zwei Monate eingeführt - eine riesen Leistung für unsere Internationalisierungsgruppe. Umso schneller wir Twitter für Leute überall auf der Welt zugänglich machen, desto schneller die verschiedenen Kulturen der Welt den globalen Gespräch auf Twitter beeinflussen können.

Hier sind ein paar deutschsprachige Benutzer, die sich schon aktiv auf Twitter engagieren und Dich vielleicht interessieren:

@SPIEGEL_Eil—deutsche Zeitschrift
@Paulvandyk—Grammy nominierter DJ aus Berlin
@silenttiffy—deutsche Schriftstellerin
@Dieternuhr—Kabarettist und Moderator
@Calmund—langjähriger Bundesliga-Manager

Um Deine Sprachpräferenzen einzustellen, besuche Deine Einstellungsseite und wähle Deutsch im Aufklappmenü "Sprache" aus. Die ganze Web-Oberfläche wird sich sofort übersetzen! Als nächster Schritt, besuche und folge dem offizielen "Twitter auf Deutsch" Profil, @Twitter_De. So können unsere deutsche Benutzer sich über Neuigkeiten bei Twitter auf dem Laufenden halten. Zuletzt, sag Deinen Freunden Bescheid und geh voran und twittere!

My name is Abdur and I'm part of the Research team here at Twitter. As Chief Scientist, it's my job to interpret data so we can understand and appreciate how Twitter is constantly evolving. Since it's the end of the year, we thought it would be interesting to review the topics and issues that captured global attention over the year. In 2009, Twitter’s Trending Topics helped us understand what was happening around the world showing us that people everywhere can be united in concern around important events; excited about a new movie; or geek-out about a major new technology.

Among all the keywords, hashtags, and phrases that proliferated throughout the year, one topic surfaced repeatedly. Twitter users found the Iranian elections the most engaging topic of the year. The terms #iranelection, Iran and Tehran were all in the top-21 of Trending Topics, and #iranelection finished in a close second behind the regular weekly favorite #musicmonday.

These are Twitter’s top Trending Topics across several categories—an interesting time capsule of what was happening as this decade came to a close.

News Events
1. #iranelection
2. Swine Flu
3. Gaza
4. Iran
5. Tehran
6. #swineflu
7. AIG
8. #uksnow
9. Earth Hour
10. #inaug09

People
1. Michael Jackson
2. Susan Boyle
3. Adam Lambert
4. Kobe (Bryant)
5. Chris Brown
6. Chuck Norris
7. Joe Wilson
8. Tiger Woods
9. Christian Bale
10. A-Rod (Alex Rodriguez)

Movies
1. Harry Potter
2. New Moon
3. District 9
4. Paranormal Activity
5. Star Trek
6. True Blood
7. Transformers 2
8. Watchmen
9. Slumdog Millionaire
10. G.I. Joe

TV Shows
1. American Idol
2. Glee
3. Teen Choice Awards
4. SNL (Saturday Night Live)
5. Dollhouse
6. Grey’s Anatomy
7. VMAS (Video Music Awards)
8. #bsg (Battlestar Galatica)
9. BET Awards
10. Lost

Sports (Teams, Events, Leagues)
1. Super Bowl
2. Lakers
3. Wimbledon
4. Cavs (Cleveland Cavaliers)
5. Superbowl
6. Chelsea
7. NFL
8. UFC 100
9. Yankees
10. Liverpool

Technology
1. Google Wave
2. Snow Leopard
3. Tweetdeck
4. Windows 7
5. CES
6. Palm Pre
7. Google Latitude
8. #E3
9. #amazonfail
10. Macworld

Hash Tags
1. #musicmonday
2. #iranelection
3. #sxsw
4. #swineflu
5. #nevertrust
6. #mm
7. #rememberwhen
8. #3drunkwords
9. #unacceptable
10. #iwish