microblog

Twitter has indeed acquired Summize, a nifty search engine built specifically to index Twitter posts, TechCrunch reported Tuesday along with a video of Twitter founder Evan Williams talking about it.

The news follows sporadic rumors that were accompanied by both shaky confirmations and shaky denials. An under-the-radar blogger, Josh Chandler, reported the news first; GigaOM's Om Malik was the first big name to "confirm" it.

Some logistics, as reported by TechCrunch: five of Summize's six employees will become Twitter employees, minus founder Jay Verdy, who will depart the company for "a new project." Naturally, … Read more

Fans of microblogging service Twitter are apparently impervious to repeated outages and technical problems--and their enthusiasm is spreading.

Research firm Hitwise on Tuesday reported that traffic to the Twitter site increased 500 percent the week ending July 5, 2008, compared with the same period last year. That's a significant jump for a service that's continually up and down--and still lacking a clear revenue stream.

What's more, many users of the service appear to be unruffled by Twitter's technical issues. The share of returning visitors has averaged approximately 53 percent over the past four months, according … Read more

Over the past day, a flurry of tech blogs has bloomed with rumors that microblogging service Twitter might buy Summize, a nifty Twitter search engine.

The juicy news was first reported by a virtually unknown blogger, Josh Chandler. And with all the chatter, you'd think it were the next AOL-Bebo. That's because the world of tech blogs (and this one is no exception) has a remarkable tendency to ignore the fact that Twitter is still largely a foreign concept outside the digitally astute and that there are plenty of avid Twitter users who still don't know what … Read more

Microblogging service Twitter is a central hub of geek chatter, and if there's anything geeks love to chatter about, it's Apple news.

Consequently, Twitter has bolstered its servers in anticipation of Monday's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), at which healthy doses of Steve Jobs announcements are expected.

"We are expecting approximately 10 times our normal daily traffic so we've made some plans to accommodate this dramatic surge," a post on the company blog explained. Last year at WWDC, the service crashed--as it's often prone to do.

In an extreme situation, the service can go … Read more

Populist could be one of the more convoluted products I've seen lately, but it's a whole lot of fun once you know what you're doing.

Having recently taken a look at Plurk, I feel compelled to give it a mention here since the two share some quirks in common. Like Plurk, Populist is a service that's been designed to help people broadcast little bits of information to others in a very structured manner. What makes it different is that it's all about stuff you like in various categories like books, movies, TV shows, and more. Jaiku toyed with this idea a little by letting people add tiny icons to their posts, but Populist takes it a step further by making those icons double as categories.

You begin with 14 categories to start filling in. Every time you update that information other folks will be able to view it along with any of your previous entries as noted with a number that shows up when you mouse over it. You can also expand the types of things you're sharing all the way up to 29 categories with some of the more obscure ones like recipes, rides, and "un-obtanium" for things you'll never be able to afford or get your hands on.

Like any other bookmarking service, the idea is that you can find other people who are discovering things you haven't and track what they're digging. In that regard there's a very loosely useful built-in social component that lets you befriend others and track what they're saving and sharing, as well as capture anything they've posted and add it to your own lists.

The only problem is that exploring the existing community is tough. I found the public stream of people's additions a little difficult to sort through (messages are literally flying back and forth across the screen), but once you're on someone's profile it's a simple affair to drill down into any of their categories and find some things worth clicking and potentially bookmarking.

Populist is the first project from the folks at Particle, who include the founder of uber-hip event service Crush3r (review) and the designer of many of Yahoo's mobile apps. Keep an eye on these guys.

See also: Friendfeed

… Read more

Twitter's recent reliability issues and downtime have left a hole in the nanoblog market, to the extent that such a market actually exists. Among the bloggerati, FriendFeed is filling in the vaccuum and could become the new Twitter. It's got a good feedback system and it also has features that make finding and adding friends very easy. And FriendFeed reads in Twitter content, so users can have the best of both worlds.

Now there's an even newer Twitter clone: Plurk (about the name). Its big advantage is its user interface. You get a slick timeline view of … Read more

Twitter clones have been aplenty since the service launched in mid-2006. Many have come out offering more, foregoing some of the simplicity that made Twitter popular to begin with (see Poodz and Pownce). However, one that's just cropped up, called Adocu, is almost a joke, ditching the 160-character cap and only limiting messages to whatever you can fit inside of one (sometimes giant) word.

Users are encouraged to string multiple words together. You can fit nearly whatever you want as long as there are no spaces. OK, however, are dashes, apostrophes, commas, and periods--meaning you can add some order … Read more

This post was updated at 10:49 AM with comment from Ariel Waldman.

Some Web enthusiasts find microblogging service Twitter to be addictive because you can say absolutely anything you want--as long as it's 140 characters or less. So what happens when "saying anything" translates into harassment?

One avid Twitter user, Ariel Waldman, posted an entry Thursday on her personal blog, declaring that "Twitter refuses to uphold (its) terms of service."

She said she started receiving "multiple accounts of harassment" from another user of the microblogging service and that when she petitioned to … Read more

Microblogging service Twitter has reportedly closed a $15 million Series B funding round, according to Om Malik of GigaOM.

Malik estimates that it will bring the company's valuation to about $80 million and that the round is led by a new investor rather than existing investor Union Square Ventures (though the latter is participating). CNET News.com originally reported late in April that Twitter had signed a term sheet for either $15 or $20 million.

Rumors peg the new lead investor as Boston-based Spark Capital. An independent source hinted to CNET News.com that this is likely indeed the … Read more