Twitter trounces the terrible twos, turns three
Twitter turns three today. It’s a birthday some might not have thought the service would live to see after severe downtime and reliability issues during its second year in existence. But Twitter made the hires it needed to, kicked its problems, and endured. Actually, it thrived.
When it launched back in 2006, it was known as Twttr, and was a side project of podcasting service Odeo. We briefly covered it in July of that year, in… Continue Reading
A Payne in the Twitter Fail Whale’s side
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… Continue Reading
SoCal earthquake a powerful reminder of Twitter’s potential
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… Continue Reading
Twitter has its search, now it’s time to embrace mobile
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… Continue Reading
The road to Twitter search is, in fact, paved with Summize
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… Continue Reading
Is the road to Twitter search paved with Summize?
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… Continue Reading
Twitter: Adding employees, losing features
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,… Continue Reading
The next time you complain about a company on Twitter, Get Satisfaction may be listening
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… Continue Reading