The Next Web reported this morning that Twitter has opened its analytics platform to the general public, free of charge (until now, the feature was only available to Twitter’s advertising customers). Now, if you log on to ads.twitter.com and click  “Timeline activity” under the “Analytics” tab, you’ll see a comprehensive chart showing the favorites, retweets, and replies each of your tweets has received. You’ll also see an interactive timeline charting your mentions, follows, and unfollows on a day-to-day basis. Also for your benefit, the site lets you download your analytics into an Excel spreadsheet.

Here's mine. I'm not sure how to interpret this, but my most popular tweet in the past few days was about Liza Minnelli being my spirit animal.

Sure, it can be pretty depressing to see a visual representation of that two-week period where you lost six followers and gained none—or to be reminded of the time you thought your Red Wedding tweet was hilarious, but nobody favorited it. But there’s no doubting it’s a helpful tool in improving your Twitter skills and charting your progress—or just a nifty way to stroke your social media ego.

Here it is! (Photo: GMA/Twitter)

Because apparently there aren’t enough music apps in existence, Twitter announced today on ABC gigglefest Good Morning America that it will be making its highly anticipated foray into the crowded music market. Along with a website, Twitter #Music (hashtag!) is a new, separate app for your iPhone that’s slated to be released later this afternoon.

Twitter explained on GMA that its new app “helps you find music that’s popular on Twitter and music based on the bands you follow.” The music discovery service is centered around four tabs: Popular, Emerging, Suggested, and #NowPlaying.

The first two tabs focus on the Twitter community as a whole and highlight what everyone in the world is listening to, while the latter two provide a personalized experience: Suggested helps you search for new music depending on your friends’ tastes and #NowPlaying shows you what your friends are listening to. It also takes public humiliation to a whole new level: “For instance, if your friend tweets that they are listening to a song by Justin Bieber, that song will show up on that page.” Sounds great!

It's important to note that Twitter isn’t storing any of this music, but aggregating it from three sources: iTunes, Spotify, and Rdio. Preview clips will be played using iTunes, but Rdio and Spotify subscribers will be able to log-in to their accounts to stream full tracks. Twitter’s blog writes that it's looking to add other music providers. Also, there's no Android version just yet.

Twitter explained that its service and music “go great together” since so many people use it to share and discover today’s hottest hits:

Many of the most-followed accounts on Twitter are musicians, and half of all users follow at least one musician. This is why artists turn to Twitter first to connect with their fans — and why we wanted to find a way to surface songs people are tweeting about.

Musicians, trendsetters and important E! hosts like Ryan Seacrest are already raving about it so it’s obviously the perfect tool if you love listening to music from Z100.

https://twitter.com/RyanSeacrest/statuses/322483675839221760

(Photo: Twitter)

Links on Twitter are currently broken.

When you click a link on Twitter, it takes you to a page that says "Something is technically wrong." It may have to do with Twitter's link shortener, t.co, which all links posted to the site are forwarded through. Photos uploaded to the service with the link pic.twitter.com are still working. We've reached out to Twitter and will update when we know more.

Meanwhile, enjoy the panic:

https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedAndrew/status/322349581264371713

https://twitter.com/AntDeRosa/status/322348538510069760

https://twitter.com/digg/status/322348411187761153

Update 10:09 a.m.: Links are back! Still waiting for more info from Twitter.U

Update 10:48 a.m.: Twitter issued a brief explanation on its status blog:

Some users may have experienced an issue with links contained within Tweets. This issue has been resolved as of 7:10 am PST.

Mr. Dorsey the senior (Photo: Twitter)

It's almost as if you have to get a job at BuzzFeed or start a viral Tumblr to be verified on Twitter these days.

That's bad news for Marcia and Tim Dorsey, the parents of Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey. With your famous model-dating son out of the house, how do you spend your time? By attempting to get the company he founded to verify your Twitter accounts, of course.

@Tim535353 and @marciadorsey have launched a campaign to have their Twitter handles verified. Even the mayor of St. Louis is vouching for them!

Jack, please call your parents. They just want to love you.

And be verified.

o_o (Photo: Twitter blog)

In light of the recent hacks of big brand Twitter accounts like Burger King and Jeep, Twitter has finally announced two-factor authentication. Haha JK, they just published a condescending blog post blaming their security vulnerabilities on your shitty passwords.

Fake Cord Jefferson (Screencap: Twitter)

Spam accounts are nothing new on Twitter, as anyone who has ever tweeted the words "iPad" or "sex" can attest. But another spam ring has recently cropped up on the platform, and it uses the name cache of prominent journalists, techies and celebrities in an attempt to attract followers.

On Friday, Gawker writer Cord Jefferson discovered a copycat account that lifted his name, photo and bio in order to appear as if the account was that of the real Cord Jefferson. "Ha ha. What is this? Why is this? How do I kill this thing?" he tweeted. Twenty minutes later, BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski noticed the same thing. "Fuck is this account?" he tweeted.

As it turns out, Misters Jefferson and Kaczynski aren't the only media people affected by this trend. It appears that these spam accounts are also following hundreds of other spam accounts that pull the same trick, taking a real user's avatar, background photo and bio in order to make the fake profile appear legitimate.

There's one for actress Chloe Sevigny, Politico tech reporter Eliza Krigman, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen and Dropbox product manager Matt Holden.

Celebrity impostors have always been an issue for social networks, which is why verified accounts exist. But the phenomenon doesn't seem to be related to a user's number of followers. Mr. Kaczynski has over 70,000, Mr. Jefferson over 8,000, and Learnvest's Allison Kade, who also has a copycat account, just over 500. The accounts all appear to be part of the same spam enterprise, since they all follow each other.

Weirder still is the fact that none of the accounts have tweeted anything yet. If the point of creating a ring of fake accounts that appear legitimate is to disseminate your spammy message, the spammers are either still building their core base of users or they haven't decided just what exactly their message is.

Users can report the accounts for spam, but that doesn't get them removed automatically. We've reached out to Twitter for comment and will update when we hear back.

(h/t Peter Sterne)

(Photo: Instagram)

Jared Leto, seminal '90s crush who enjoys rubbing elbows with the international tech elite, has an urgent request for his Twitter followers. The 30 Seconds to Mars frontman is shooting a new music video, and he desperately needs "albinos" for it.

Apparently Mr. Leto never read up on Albinism etiquette, or else he would've known that calling someone an "Albino" is generally considered rather unfriendly.

https://twitter.com/JaredLeto/status/299018339185999872

Don't worry if you don't meet that requirement, though. If you still want to be in a music video created by a person whose most lasting claim to fame is playing a stupid hottie in a short-lived MTV series, Mr. Leto is also searching for "raver kids in LA with light tricks or who can dance."

Oh shit, this video is gonna be AWESOME.

(h/t Uproxx)

Twitter's new look.

Remember when Twitter was a mere fringe hobby, beloved by early adopters but mystifying to everyone else? Well, today we got a clear-as-a-bell reminder that those days are long gone, when the company took to the Today Show to introduce a new look.

Users can now add a header photo, and recent images have been relocated into their own snazzy box.

"What we've heard over and over again from our users is they want to bring more of their personality to the profile pages," explained CEO Dick Costolo. "So today's changes are all about bringing that personality forward, more media forward, more photos forward, so it's much easier to see these media experiences and flip through them."

Mr. Costolo was in the no-doubt rare experience of being sandwiched in between Justin Bieber's mom and a concert by Pink.

The announcement itself was preceded by a brief tour of the Twitter offices, guided by a reporter identified as hailing from E! News and introduced with the song "Rockin' Robin."

Interwoven with employee interviews and footage of the company cafeteria (which is apparently called the @birdfeeder) was an explanation of just what the company does and how ubiquitous it's become. The Biebs uses it! Obama and Romney use it!

"The draw is working on something that matters," Mr. Costolo explained, when the free snacks came up.

Once the brief office tour wrapped up, it was on to the unveiling. Mr. Costolo emerged from the green room to join Matt Lauer, Ryan Seacrest and that woman who isn't Ann Curry on the couch, in front of some strange red flower arrangement.

But not so fast--first, Mr. Lauer wanted to hear about Twitter's purpose in the long term. (You and me and everyone in the tech press both, Matt.)

"Twitter brings you closer," he said. "We see this over and over again from our users. It brings them closer to the action. It brings them closer to their heroes. Ryan's got--" and here he gestured to Mr. Seacrest, seated mere feet away--"8 million followers on Twitter. It's because he pulls them into everything he's doing. and brings them closer to everything he's doing."

Sounds to us like media might be winning the tug-of-war for Twitter's soul.

Finally, at the end of the segment, it was time to actually debut the new look.

He also added that the company is debuting an iPad app redesign, which is "all about letting people flip through photos and videos more easily."

Twitter explained the changes in more detail on the company blog, adding that, on mobile, you'll also photo streams below a person's most recent tweets.

Word came yesterday that image hosts were the next third-party services to get the boot, and from the new look it's easy to see why--a big part of this redesign appears to be standardizing the photo browsing experience. So as you consume your mid-morning coffee, you might want to take a moment to pour one out for yfrog and Twitpic.

(Photo: Wikipedia)

With the news that Google employee #20 and well-known GOOG cheerleader Marissa Mayer will be decamping from her home company of 10+ years to take the CEO role at Yahoo, the Twitersphere erupted into a mix of shock, excitement and stale Yahoo jokes.

It seems that not even a strong female computer engineer can salvage the flailing search company's flaccid reputation. Just as cries of joy rang out from our feed, so, too, did the jokes about Yahoo's incompetence. Behold, some of our favorite one liners from this afternoon's news.

Looks like the illustrious Ms. Mayer has a hefty task ahead of her.

Franzen, can you tweet me?

After six years, Twitter announced today that it will be updating its little blue bird. In fact, the company is dispensing with bubbled typefaces and lower-case t's altogether for a more symbolic logo. "From now on, this bird will be the universally recognizable symbol of Twitter. (Twitter is the bird, the bird is Twitter.)," writes creative director Doug Bowman.

Some likened the more aerodynamic redesign to Twitter's new business model. With a rumored $1 billion in sales expected in 2014, "It’s fitting that the Twitter bird is looking skyward and has a new professional haircut," says TechCrunch.

But on careful reading, the oddly high-minded announcement (about lopping off a few feathers) could also be read like a coded plea to Twitter's most curmudgeonly critic, noted bird obsessive Jonathan Franzen.

Back in March, if you'll recall, Mr. Franzen followed up his scathing anti-Facebook screed with some choice words for the 140 character crowd. " Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose," Mr. Franzen told students at Tulane University, denouncing the service as "the ultimate irresponsible medium," for "serious readers and writers."

But Mr. Bowman's description of the new logo makes it sound anything but frivolous:

Our new bird grows out of love for ornithology, design within creative constraints, and simple geometry. This bird is crafted purely from three sets of overlapping circles — similar to how your networks, interests and ideas connect and intersect with peers and friends. Whether soaring high above the earth to take in a broad view, or flocking with other birds to achieve a common purpose, a bird in flight is the ultimate representation of freedom, hope and limitless possibility.

A love of ornithology? Freedom? Ever hear of playing hard to get?