VentureBeat

The micro-messaging service Twitter has been remarkably stable over the past several weeks following prolonged periods of downtime and wonkiness. Recently, as former stalwarts Gmail, Amazon S3 and even Netflix have gone down, Twitter has endured. As such, it’s taken a moment to bestow a new title on one of its top developers: Alex Payne will now be the official API Lead.

The fact that people are getting promoted within Twitter rather than fired is definitely a good sign. Payne has been leading the service’s API development for about a year and a half now, as the Twitter Blog notes. Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey has said in the past that the Twitter API is the way most people connect to the service. In fact, he’s said its traffic is 20 times larger than that of the actual website itself.

Given the rate Twitter’s website is growing, those API usage numbers must be scary. Perhaps that is why Payne will now have someone under him, Matt Sanford, another Twitter engineer. Sanford came over from the Summize team after it was purchase by Twitter and has experience with the search APIs that will be crucial as Twitter continues to implement Summize search into the main Twitter experience.

The two will also likely be vital in any mobile application moves Twitter makes in the future. Which it should do soon, given that it’s basically killed off SMS updates in all but three countries.

Payne caused a little bit of controversy a few months back when a post he wrote on the Twitter Developer blog seemed to suggest that power users of the site were to blame for its woes. Twitter came back to explain that while power users do take up a lot of resources, it’s the spammers they are more worried about. Twitter has taken steps in the past several weeks to eliminate spammers on the service.

Payne has done a good job answering questions about Twitter’s issues on the site’s blogs and apparently is pretty good as his actual job as well.

You can find me on Twitter here along with fellow VentureBeat writers Eric Eldon, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha, Chris Morrison and Dan Kaplan. Oh, and we have a VentureBeat account (for our posts) as well.

[The Twitter Fail Whale is the image shown when Twitter is down. Because the downtime was so frequent up until recently, the whale has become a cult figure of sorts. Twitter has been ramping up efforts to slay it.]

This morning a 5.4 magnitude earthquake struck Southern California near Los Angeles. Well before the information was anywhere on the major news outlets, tweets (Twitter messages) were flowing in at a rapid clip. I say again, events such as this showcase the power of the micro-messaging service Twitter.

When natural disasters strike, people want news ASAP. Twitter is simply very fast at disseminating information. We saw this when a large 7.8 earthquake struck China back in May and we’re seeing it again today. Today, it was especially true when used in conjunction with the social conversation and aggregation site FriendFeed. Minutes after the quake, I had various accounts of it and maps of its epicenter.

Twitter’s new search site (formerly Summize) is also an incredible tool for getting information. It used to take a little while for information on these events to trickle down depending on who you were following on Twitter. Now you can simply open Twitter Search and do a query for “earthquake” and get thousands of results. Within minutes of me opening the site up, I was alerted that there were already hundreds of updates on the earthquake — the information was coming in fast.

It takes reporters time to set up and get the story, but Twitter turns thousands of regular people into citizen journalists — all of whom are on the scene. Of course one has to worry about the spread of incorrect information, especially in the time of a disaster, but the sheer volume of tweets allows for the truth to come up.

Many people only like to talk about Twitter’s monetization strategy or when it will hit “mainstream” usage. Throughout all of this the most important fact remains that Twitter is useful. As long as it stays that way and can maintain (or achieve depending on the week) reliability, the rest of that will come.

You can find me on Twitter here along with fellow VentureBeat writers Eric Eldon, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha, Chris Morrison and Dan Kaplan. Oh, and we have a VentureBeat account (for our posts) as well.

Update: The so-called “video Twitter” site that I’ve written up a couple of times, 12seconds, also has a user, PodGen, with supposed (see the comments) video footage of the quake from the 36th floor of an L.A. building.

Update 2: The 12seconds vid was fake, posted after the fact, a co-founder of 12seconds confirmed.

Update 3: Twitter itself is now weighing in on the earthquake and Twitter’s role in spreading the news. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone notes that the AP pushed out its first wire item on the news 9 minutes after people were already tweeting about it on Twitter. The first tweet about it came mere seconds after the earthquake started.

He also says:

Whether it’s updates from best friends, internet pals, companies, brands, or breaking world events, the real-time aspect of sending and receiving Twitter updates continues to motivate our work.

Check out the chart below.

The lack of any search functionality within Twitter has been, quite frankly, ridiculous. The company itself said it would be coming shortly last fall, and yet it never came. Meanwhile others, including FriendFeed added the ability to search tweets (Twitter messages). With its purchase of Summize now complete, Twitter finally has its search and it’s time to move on to the next glaring omission: Mobile.

The mobile version of Twitter found at m.twitter.com, for lack of a better word, sucks. It is fairly fast, I will give it that, but that’s only because it is so barebones that it makes skeletons look meaty. When I try to use it on my phone, I can’t even see the entire message I’m typing because the input box is so small. If you only have a little bit of time to check it out (as I would suspect most do on their phones), catching up on what you missed is nearly impossible because of the lack of the aforementioned search. And even attempting to look back manually through tweets, you can only got back a few pages before Twitter cuts you off completely.

Worst of all, there is no way to see your replies. It’s laughably bad to the point of being useless.

With the new Apple iPhone and iPod Touch App Store, 3rd party native clients are starting to come out, but is Twitter really going to always rely on 3rd parties to do its work for them?

The app that is hot right now is Twitterific. It’s pretty good, but leaves quite a few things to be desired — namely it’s slow and buggy. Loading it up takes several seconds and quite often the application will just close itself. Another one, Twinkle, looks promising (I used it a bit on my old, jailbroken iPhone and it worked quite well), but it’s not approved for the App store yet.

If Twitter doesn’t release its own robust mobile client, it’s really dropping the ball. This isn’t limited to the iPhone of course.

The location-based capabilities of several phones including those built around the upcoming Android platform by Google look to offer a lot of exciting possibilities in the mobile space. Twitter seems like a company perfectly poised to take advantage of this excitement, but so far, has given no indication it plans to do so.

Just imagine how useful a location-aware Twitter app could be (to those who choose to use such functionality). Imagine a Twitter app with Summize search built into it. Twitter could be the de-facto messaging application of this new mobile generation. It could kill the colossal rip-off that is the text message.

I realize that Twitter works with SMS, but with companies like AT&T now charging $5 a month for 200 tiny text messages (the new rate for the iPhone plan), using that for Twitter would be ridiculous.

The one thing that always comes up when people talk about Twitter is business model. Everyone wants to know how Twitter is going to make money. Well one thing is could do right away is build an iPhone app and sell it in Apple’s App Store. It could even do exactly what Twitterific is doing and have an ad-supported free version and a paid version without the ads.

Twitter co-founder Ev Williams seems open to the idea of eventually putting ads in the Twitter stream, as he recently told Mike Arrington of TechCrunch. He actually is open to a lot of things, but seems entirely unsure of which route to take.

Twitter has done a great job hooking in some of the tech elites in the Bay Area, and now it is expanding in popularity in places like New York City and even other countries like Japan. It’s been doing a great job recently fixing the reliability issues that have plagued the site for months. The Fail Whale (pictured: left) is showing up less and less. Now with Summize on board, I have a feeling we’re going to see a lot less animosity surrounding general discussions about the site, and more talk of great growth. But Twitter must remain ahead of the curve.

I still think it will eventually hit the mainstream, but at least part of that belief is contingent on it embracing the mobile space. Twitter simply needs to do so before someone else beats them to it. Facebook and others are already coming.

You can find me on Twitter here along with fellow VentureBeat writers Eric Eldon, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha, Chris Morrison and Dan Kaplan. Oh, and we have a VentureBeat account (for our posts) as well.

Check out MobileBeat2008, VentureBeat’s conference on July 24.

Last week, a blogger named Josh Chandler sent the tech blogosphere into full-scale buzz mode with the rumor that Twitter had acquired the Twitter search engine, Summize. Turns out the rumor is true and that the 5-man strong Summize team has walked into approximately $15 million of cash and Twitter stock, Silicon Alley Insider reports.

The Virginia-based Summize team will now move to San Francisco to work with Twitter. GigaOM’s Om Malik confirmed the deal last week, although all the details were not known at the time.

The two companies teamed up for Apple’s WWDC conference in June, and when Twitter had shut down its “replies” function last month, savvy Twitterers turned to Summize, instead.

Many, including VentureBeat’s MG Siegler, had been advocating for Twitter to buy Summize for some time. Towards the end of June, Siegler wrote:

You’ve got the money now Twitter, why not just buy it [Summize] and turn it into search.twitter.com?

And that is exactly what Twitter has done. The Summize search engine has been reskinned and renamed Twitter Search.

Twitter plans to further implement the Summize search features into the main site going forward and even sketched out a little design of what this might look like (below).

update: The Summize blog has more details.

The micro-messaging service Twitter may be looking to buy the Twitter search engine Summize. That’s the rumor that has been floating around the Internet since this morning.

The rumor seems to have originated on a blog written by a person named Josh Chandler, who claims to have a source on the matter. A fairly well-followed Twitter user supposedly tweeted (a Twitter message) the same news, but has since pulled that tweet. Since then it has matriculated up through the ranks.

Certainly such a purchase would make sense. Twitter currently has no real search functionality, and Summize is very good at doing just that. In fact, when Twitter had to disable the “Replies” tab on the site for several days to improve stability, it suggested that users instead use Summize to track replies. Twitter also teamed up with Summize for users wishing to follow news from Apple’s WWDC event last month.

Amid its troubles, I’ve questioned why Twitter wouldn’t simply buy Summize numerous times. After all, it has quite a bit of money now following the closing of its latest funding round.

Lack of search has been a black eye for Twitter for a long time, especially when FriendFeed added the ability to search tweet archives of those users you follow back in March. Other services such as the customer service site Get Satisfaction are also utilizing Summize because Twitter has no search functionality. Now it appears that could be fixed with one purchase.

Getting the instant messaging integration turned back on…that’s another story.

We’ve contacted Twitter on the news and will update when we know more.

update: No word from Twitter yet, but co-founder Biz Stone just wrote a post on the Twitter Blog detailing the companies who access its data via XMPP protocol. Those are Twittervision, Zappos, FriendFeed and yes, Summize.

According to Stone:

Summize has greatly improved on Twitter’s Track feature by providing a valuable filtering service using our XMPP feed.

update 2: A deal is definitely in the works, GigaOm’s Om Malik was able to confirm. It could be announced as soon as next week.

The mood around the micro-messaging service Twitter has been significantly improved in the past several weeks. The company brought in Pivotal Labs to help with its architecture problems, it has had several weeks of 98 percent plus uptime, its made some new hires and even the constantly problematic IM functionality has experienced periods of actual uptime.

When it finally announced its new round of funding yesterday and added another new member to the team this morning, things were looking very good.

The good times weren’t made to last.

Here we are this afternoon and Twitter is once again crippled. The ‘Replies’ tab has been shut off much of the day due to server stress. Without it, I think Twitter is basically useless. It turns a multi-way communication tool into a one-way communication tool.

I posted the question on the content conversation service FriendFeed and 25 people responded with largely negative thoughts on the loss of this functionality. Granted, it’s increasingly the case that FriendFeed users have anti-Twitter sentiments (many feel that FriendFeed should simply replace Twitter since you can post messages directly to it), but Twitter is still an important part of the FriendFeed ecosystem. According to my FriendFeed stats page (image below), well over a quarter of my friend’s updates to FriendFeed come from Twitter.

Many of the FriendFeed respondents suggested using Summize, the excellent Twitter tracking site. Actually, Twitter itself suggests the same thing leading me to wonder why on Earth Twitter just doesn’t buy Summize?

Twitter laughably still has no real search functionality, and now it has a crippled reply functionality. Summize has no problem handling either of these. Twitter even teamed up with the service for Apple’s WWDC event. You’ve got the money now Twitter, why not just buy it and turn it into search.twitter.com?

Like all of its other problems, Twitter will get through this, but it continues to dangerously straddle the line of alienating its users by crippling functionality. Is it preposterous to think about shutting the whole service down for a little while and relaunching with a product that fully works? Maybe, but it’s getting less preposterous.

You can find me on Twitter here along with fellow VentureBeat writers Eric Eldon, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha and Chris Morrison. Oh, and we have a VentureBeat account (for our posts) as well.

[Check out MobileBeat, our mobile conference on July 24. Vote for your favorite mobile application or service company.]

While it wasn’t made very clear during its outages over the past several months, Twitter has been using the online customer service site, Get Satisfaction to respond to customer complaints. Now, the two are going to work hand in hand with one another to handle customer inquiries about other companies.

Technically, Get Satisfaction is teaming up with Summize, a great Twitter message search and tracking utility, to launch its new “Overheard” feature. (We previously pointed out how useful Summize was during the recent Chinese earthquake news that spread through Twitter.)

For companies that choose to use Overheard, the service will scour the public Twitter stream using Summize to find when that company’s name is mentioned. These tweets (Twitter messages) will then be piped into the Get Satisfaction support network. Here they can be used just as if the question were asked or the comment made on the site itself. Others can respond to these messages, and Overheard will alert the user on Twitter that their question is being answered on Get Satisfaction.

Initial Overhead partners include Comcast, O’Reilly, Seesmic and MyBlogLog.

Get Satisfaction also has a service called “Help Center” which can be placed directly on customer’s own sites. This allows for a more fully branded version of the service Get Satisfaction offers.

Utilizing Twitter seems like a good idea for next generation customer service. Comcast has already received some good press when it saw Mike Arrington of TechCrunch’s tweet about his displeasure with his service and worked with him to fix it. Unfortunately, most companies would have absolutely no idea how to do this — if they even knew what Twitter was at all. The more straightforward customer service angle that Get Satisfaction is taking with Overheard should help companies better understand such power.

Get Satisfaction raised $1.2 million in seed funding last September.

[Disclosure: Get Satisfaction was developed by a team led by Thor Muller, who is an advisor to VentureBeat.]