If there were any doubt that the internet displays a persistent bias towards cats and there really isn't - it can be finally laid to rest: lolcats will now find their native language supported on Twitter, albeit not particularly well. The "lolcatz" beta localization shows up in Settings, and you can see Twitter in lolspeak immediately at https://twitter.com/?lang=lolc. Though we'd hardly claim to be experts, there are almost certainly better substitutes for "followers" and "profile summary" than, well, "FOLLOWERS" and "PROFILE SUMMARY." You could be forgiven for barely noticing the change in places, especially since tweets and profile descriptions remain un-loled.

Twitter hasn't said how long this setting will last (or if we'll truly ever find the feline Rosetta Stone that will let it move out of beta), but it may well persist as long as Facebook's "Pirate" language setting, which remains an option despite the general obsolescence of Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Via-The Next Web

Here’s what Twitter said about search in the announcement: “Search results now surface the most relevant mix of Tweets, photos, and accounts, all in one stream (similar to the stream in Discover). We’ve also added a new search button to Twitter for iPhone, letting you search from anywhere within the app. (This button was already available in the Android and iPad apps.) Look for the magnifying glass icon next to the button you use to compose a Tweet.”

In a separate blog post on the company’s engineering blog, Twitter talks a bit about how it ranks search results.

Youngin Shin of Twitter’s search quality team (Twitter has a search quality team) explains, “When a user searches, different types of content are searched separately, returning a sequence of candidate results for each content type with a type-specific score for each. For certain content types that are displayed as a single group or gallery unit, such as users or images, we assign the maximum score of results as the representative score of this content type. The result sequences for some content types may be trimmed or discarded entirely at this point.”

“Once results of different content types are prepared, each type-specific score is converted into a universally compatible score, called a ‘uniscore’,” adds Shin. “Uniscores of different modules are used as a means to blend content types as in a merge-sort, except for the penalization of content type transition. This is to avoid over-diversification of content types in the blended result.”

As Shin explains, all pieces of individual content are assigned type-specific scores called “raw” scores by their corresponding services. Raw scores are then converted into uniscores using type-specific log-linear score conversion functions. According to Shin, the chance of a converted score taking its value in [0, 1] is at least 95%.

Read the full post here. It’s an interesting look into the back end of Twitter Search.

Another day, another new feature from the guys at Twitter HQ. Today it's not an all singing, all dancing new app, but just a few tweaks to the way you view photos and videos on the micro-blogging platform.

Now when you click on an image when you're browsing through a user's feed or amongst search results, a blown up version will take over the page (as above), so you don't have to navigate away anywhere else.

As well as images getting a revamp, videos that are from the Vine app, YouTube or Vimeo will also start appearing soon in the media gallery alongside regular images.

The update comes at a perfect time when we've all been crazily making little Vine videos and visual media is clearly paramount for the Twitter team at the moment in order to get people sharing more and create a more engaging experience.

Via - Twitter Blog