Here’s something you do not see everyday. Apparently, twitter helped spark Republicans and Democrats to come together to make an agreement on the looming debt bill. A white house aid confirmed rumors that a conversation on twitter helped influence the recently announced agreement. The bill is expected to be passed today sometime.

This comes after President Obama asked people to tweet their representatives in congress to urge them to come to an agreement on the debt bill. He also asked people to use the hashtag #compromise. His staff spent the entire day tweeting the names of Republican legislators from every single state.

Even though Obama lost 36,000 followers on Friday, it appears it may have been worth it in the long run. A debt deal was finally passed and while both sides did not get what they wanted, the country can at least breath a little that a default is not going to happen. Even better, it proves that twitter can be an extremely powerful tool.

Twitter has finally developed a tool in the Twitter API to remove not safe for work (NSFW) material to be filtered out. The tool is called “possibly sensitive.” The goal is to allow users to have the ability to flag links that are posted on Twitter as NSFW.

Twitter has said that they have wanted to include a tool like this for some time. Currently, a user can report a tweet or photo as offensive and twitter manually reviews the material. This new tool seems to remove twitter from the equation so that they can move their staff onto other more important things.

I’m sure there will still be some moderation process if something is marked as NSFW by a large number of people. The goal here is to filter out images and tweets from people at work and minors so that they are not exposed to things they should not be viewing.

Thank you Twitter.

Twitter has officially announced a new feature today called Timely Tweets. Essentially, timely tweets are promoted tweets that will appear the top of your timeline. They are just like regular sweets in that they will only appear on your timeline once. You can also remove them from your timeline by clicking remove.

Twitter’s goal here is to sell more sponsored tweets from big brand Advertisers. They already have attracted the likes of Dell, Gatorade, HBO, TNT, among many other brands.

A lot of non profit organizations such as the American Red Cross and the Make-A-Wish Foundation also have expressed their interest in the new service.

We will have to wait and see if timely tweets can catch on or not. Essentially the only new difference between them and the old sponsored tweets is that timely tweets will get more exposure to twitter followers because of their location.

Twitter says their goal is to enhance user experience, but we will see if this new feature can truly enhance that.

Twitter seems to be focusing on ways to better monetize their traffic. There were some cuts made last week but this week two new senior management staff were added. Joel Lunenfield was hired as the director of Global Brand Strategy. The second hire was Pam Kramer and her title is Vice President of Consumer Marketing.

Twitter has had some problems in the past to monetize their traffic unlike the other giant social network, facebook. These two hires seem to point out that the senior officials of twitter understand they need to better monetize the traffic they have to keep improving their service. The hires also point out that twitter is aiming to bring more mainstream brands on board for long-term advertising deals.

There is nothing we can do but wait and see the effectiveness that these two hires have on twitter.Hopefully they can help improve on twitter’s two weak areas that have plagued growth from twitter’s birth.