People send more than 200 Tweets per minute about the weather. When conditions turn severe, weather-related Tweets double, as people share powerful personal stories along with reports of hurricanes, heat waves and blizzards.

Starting today, The Weather Channel and Twitter have teamed up to bring you real-time Tweets about the weather on The Weather Channel itself, weather.com, their mobile apps. The Weather Channel has created Twitter accounts for more than 200 U.S. cities that will tweet regular local forecast updates. Now, you can follow your local weather account to stay in the know.

These accounts join a wide variety of other Twitter accounts that provide news, color and commentary around weather events, from the mild to the extreme:

• @ReedTimmerTVN is a tornado chaser from Discovery Network’s Storm Chasers program, tweeting his storm-chasing successes and failures.
• @AlRoker, the weather and feature anchor on NBC News’ TODAY show, tweets humorous weather news and anecdotes from across the US.
• @USATodayWeather USA Today was the first national newspaper to publish a weather map; now, it tweets relevant forecast information all day long.
• @I80Chains, an account for Northern California’s Interstate 80, reports when snow chains are necessary to travel over mountain passes due to inclement weather.
• @KarlTheFog tweets humorous updates to San Franciscans based on current fog status.
• @capitalweather lets folks near Washington DC keep up with weather-related news
• @JackatNWS, the National Weather Service administrator, tweets about major national US weather events.
• @usnoaagov tweets interesting facts and stories from the U.S. government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which monitors the condition of the oceans and the atmosphere.
• @wunderground tweets and retweets major local weather events from around the world
• #wxreport: people in the U.S. can include this hashtag in their Tweets to report local weather conditions to the National Weather Service.

Today, we’re rolling out two new features on Twitter.com that help you discover more on Twitter. You can now see when someone favorites or retweets one of your Tweets. You can also learn which Tweets are most interesting and inspiring to the people you follow.

The first new feature offers a simple way to see what's happening on Twitter in relation to you. Just click on the new tab with your @username, and you’ll be able to see which of your Tweets are Favorites, plus the latest Retweets (of your Tweets), Tweets directed to you, and your new Followers.

The other new feature is the Activity tab. It provides a rich new source of discovery by highlighting the latest Favorites, Retweets, and Follows from the people you follow on Twitter – all in one place. It’s easier than ever to explore Twitter, connect with people, and discover what’s happening around the world.

Twitter continues to grow around the globe at a record pace. Just a year ago, we delivered 65 million Tweets a day. Today, we generate over 200 million Tweets per day. One year ago, there were approximately 150,000 registered Twitter apps. Now, there are more than one million that connect to Twitter. And our team has grown from 250 people to more than 600 in the past 12 months.

More importantly, Twitter is where people around the globe come to instantly connect to what’s most meaningful to them. This makes Twitter the only place in the world to get a real-time pulse on what people are thinking and doing practically anywhere.

We’ve come very far in a short time. Now we have an opportunity to expand Twitter’s reach with a significant round of funding led by the venture firm DST Global, with the participation of several of our existing investors. We will use these resources to aggressively innovate, hire more great people and invest in international expansion.

Thank you for everything you’ve done to help get us here and for inspiring us to work even harder. We can’t wait for you to see what we have planned to make Twitter even better.

Twitter celebrated its first non-English launch in April 2008 with the release of Twitter in Japanese. In November 2009, Twitter launched it’s second and third languages: Spanish and French. And, with today’s launch of Dutch and Indonesian, Twitter has been fully translated into eleven languages.

Dutch and Indonesian were the first languages to be fully translated by community volunteers using our Translation Center that opened earlier in the year. Volunteers translate twitter.com, support pages, desktop and mobile applications — everything except the Tweets. Then, a select group of the most active translators work closely with the team at Twitter to maintain localized versions of the service.

Thanks to the active and growing Twitter community (200,000 translators and counting), the launch of today’s two languages is our fastest to date. From the first calls for community involvement to today’s launch, the localization process for Dutch and Indonesian took just one month. We will be using this new process to translate Twitter into many more languages soon. Next up: Filipino and Malay. If you speak one of these (or other) languages, visit our Translation Center to contribute to Twitter’s localization efforts.

We all come to Twitter to connect with the latest information on the topics and people we care about. So when we decide to follow a favorite brand, business or charitable organization, we expect to be among the first to get a special announcement, access to exclusive content or a great offer.

That's why starting today, we're introducing a way to ensure that the most important Tweets from the organizations you follow reach you directly, by placing them at or near the top of your timeline. These Promoted Tweets will scroll through the timeline like any other Tweet, and like regular Tweets, they will appear in your timeline just once. Promoted Tweets can also be easily dismissed from your timeline with a single click.

We’ll be rolling out and testing this new offering over the next several weeks with a select group of partners, including Best Western, Dell, Gatorade, Groupon, HBO, JetBlue, LivingSocial, Microsoft Xbox, Red Bull, Sephora, Starbucks, Summit Entertainment’s “50/50”, TNT and Virgin America among others — with more to come soon. During this phase, you may also see Promoted Tweets in your timeline from non-profit organizations you follow, including charity: water, Make-A-Wish Foundation, Room to Read, The American Red Cross and Water.org.

From the start, our philosophy around advertising has been simple: We put our users first and strive to create products that enrich the Twitter experience for every Twitter user. We’re excited about this next step and look forward to your feedback.

We are often asked the question, "How do I keep my Twitter account safe and private?" Good question, and we’re happy you asked.

First, you should know that attempts to directly “hack" Twitter are extremely rare. The majority of account compromises actually happen as a direct result of "phishing" schemes. Phishing is a way to target users by sending them fraudulent messages meant to trick them into sharing their passwords. This can come in the form of fake emails, attachments or log-in screens that are designed to look similar to your Twitter sign-in page.

You should know that Twitter never sends emails that request your password or asks you to download attachments. Similarly, you will never have to enter your Twitter password into anything other than a Twitter log-in screen on the web and applications that you trust. You can always make sure that you’re on the real Twitter site by checking the address bar in your browser--make sure the domain is Twitter.com. There is lot more about protecting yourself from phishing attempts on our support pages.

Here are some additional important recommendations from our Safety Center:

• Use a strong password with at least 10 characters and a combination of letters, numbers and other characters for your Twitter account. And use a unique password for each website you use (email, banking, etc.); that way, if one account gets compromised, the rest are safe. A personal email account that’s compromised is the second most likely way an intruder gains access to Twitter accounts.
• Use HTTPS for improved security on Twitter. This is the same encryption technology that allows you to safely make payments online. Learn how to do this here.
• We recommend linking your phone to your Twitter account. Doing this could save your account if you lose control of your personal email and/or password. Here’s how to do it.
• If you think your account has been compromised, visit our help page for compromised accounts to find out how to fix it quickly.

We’re committed to keeping Twitter a safe and open community and educating you, our users, about the best ways to keep your accounts secure. We post regular updates about safety and security via @safety and regularly update our account security help page. For individuals and organizations using Twitter in an official capacity, Twitter for Newsrooms has been updated with an excellent safety and security checklist, located here.

Today we’re releasing the latest version of Twitter for Android. It includes some of the most commonly requested features from our users.

First, we now offer push notifications. Push notifications let you instantly receive Twitter updates – no matter what you’re doing on your phone. In your account settings, select “automatic refresh” and choose to receive updates for Direct Messages, @Mentions (from the people you follow or anyone), and Tweets.

You can also now use multiple accounts on Twitter for Android without ever logging out. It’s easy to switch between accounts to discover and share what’s happening in the world. Plus, we’ve updated the appearance of home screen widgets and added a bunch of other improvements and bug fixes.

You can download this updated version of Twitter for Android now from Android Market.

Application developers play a fundamental role in helping people get the best out of Twitter. As an ecosystem, we’ve just crossed one million registered applications, built by more than 750,000 developers around the world. This is up from 150,000 apps just a year ago.  A new app is registered every 1.5 seconds, fueling a spike in ecosystem growth in the areas of analytics, curation and publisher tools.

Investors and businesses are taking note. Since December 2010, more than $500 million has been invested in ecosystem companies, and more than a billion dollars has been paid out in acquisitions. This level of investment is indicative of the opportunity for developers and entrepreneurs to build successful businesses as part of the Twitter platform.

Apps help people understand and make the most of Twitter, whether they’re on the web, on mobile, and even watching television.  A few examples:

• Mass Relevance combed through more than 160,000 Tweets to bring the White House’s first Twitter Town Hall to life though real-time content curation and visualization.
• Trendrr evaluated the sentiment of Tweets about sci-fi thriller SUPER8 to measure the film’s blockbuster $38 million opening weekend.
• Datasift just announced $6M in new funding today for the work they do to make the Twitter firehose accessible to any developer.
• Poptweets created an addictive iPhone trivia game that challenges players to match Tweets with the famous people who said them.
• Radian6 turned its brand monitoring tools into a thriving business and was recently acquired by Salesforce for $326 million.

The entire Twitter team is committed to investing in the ecosystem by listening to developers and enabling them with the right tools and information. Today we’re introducing a new Twitter Developer site, where anyone in the ecosystem can start building with Twitter, connect directly with Twitter team members, exchange ideas with fellow developers, and find all the resources they need to create their own product or business.