Just when you thought Twitter was a dead duck, a flurry of news suggests there’s life in the old bird yet!
First up, rumors are circulating that Twitter has acquired Summize. There’s no official confirmation yet, but Summize’s search engine and sentiment analysis of Twitter would certainly make a sensible acquisition. Not so much for the public-facing interface, but for the gigabytes of useful information Summize can feed to Twitter’s developers.
Changing focus, VentureBeat reveals that, despite Twitter’s performance issues, the service is still growing strong. In fact, even new competitors such as FriendFeed and Plurk, didn’t prevent Twitter from reaching record levels of users in June. As VentureBeat suggests, at this point Twitter’s biggest enemy is itself.
Every time Twitter is offline, a competitor gets its wings!
So, how is Twitter handling its performance issues? Well, it must be close to being back on track considering its recent talk about improving its API.
The Twitter API is a big part of our success and we will be stabilizing and improving it in the short term. The rate limit is currently set to 20 requests per hour but we’re working to bring it back to 70.
Let’s hope this is a sign that Twitter’s core functions–such as replies and archives–are now stable. Surely Twitter wouldn’t dare talk about API improvements, without first addressing issues with its basic functions.
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