Twitter takes social spotlight at London Olympics

Athletes, fans, celebrities and the president tweet about the summer games

             Twitter is basking in the Olympic spotlight, with athletes tweeting about the games and fans around the world offering their support on the social network.

Social networks from Facebook to Google+ are seeing numerous users posting comments -- and complaints -- about the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, but Twitter is believed by many observers to be seeing the most traffic. In fact, some observers say the games may become known as the Twitter Olympics.

"Twitter is a broadcast medium so it's really best for these kinds of news events," said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst at Technology Business Research. "If you were on a team at school, you would probably share commentary over Facebook. But with the Olympics, it's like the entire world is watching the same thing at the same time, and that's a Twitter thing, not a Facebook or Google+ thing."

Since Twitter is all about sharing common experiences, users have gone to the micro-blogging site in droves to cheer the victories of their Olympic athletes and mourn their losses.

Twitter reveals the anatomy of its major mobile overhaul

The social network explains what it took to make its Twitter for mobile Web available to anyone who owns a cell phone

• Twitter completed the overhaul of its mobile site today, which aims to make Twitter available to anyone who owns a cell phone -- smartphone or feature. Now people in far away or rural places, and even those on low-bandwidth networks, can use the newest version of Twitter for mobile Web on their cell phone.
• This is significant because it means that news on events like the Arab Spring, where Twitter played a major role in spreading information, will now be even easier to get.
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•  Twitter is all about making real-time information available to everyone, everywhere. In order to reach every person on the planet we recently released an update to mobile.twitter.com for feature phones and older browsers. We completely overhauled this client from the ground up, a process that resulted in a lighter-weight, faster client that looks and feels like twitter.com and our mobile apps. The app was overdue for an update on many fronts and we took the opportunity to refresh it inside and out.
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• Twitter did a complete work-over designing, prototyping, developing, testing, and calibrating its mobile system during the overhaul. It brought the user interface in-line with the latest version of Twitter and designed style sheets that could accommodate feature phone users.