Doug November 26th, 2008

Canadians who want to use Twitter while on the move are not going to be happy.  It seems the company has been squeezed by high SMS costs, and as a result, a post on the Twitter Status blog states, “[E]ffective today we are no longer delivering outbound SMS over our Canadian shortcode.”  Twitter is at least looking for alternative solutions, and you should feel free to complain to its former providers.

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Doug September 17th, 2008

“Up, up, and away” might not quite cover it; the latest stats about Twitter make Superman look like a weakling.  According to Adam Ostrow‘s report on Nielsen Online data, Twitter attracted a unique audience in August 2008 that was 419 percent larger than the one it had pulled in twelve months earlier.  The average time any given person spent on the site increased by 55 percent during the same period.  At these rates, Twitter’s on track to grow really big, really fast.

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Doug July 24th, 2008

It’d been days? weeks? since anyone had observed a problem with Twitter.  We were well on the way to setting a record, I’m sure.  Only today, users everywhere saw their follower/following counts drop dramatically.  Part of the problem seems to be that Twitter went way overboard in an attempt to reduce spam.  The other part, as a post on the official Twitter Blog admits, was “an error during a database upgrade.”  Confidence-inspiring as always, although Twitter is its the way to restoring the follower/following relationships.

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Doug June 13th, 2008

Not to be “all Twitter, all the time,” but this week, two more Twitter-related stories seem worth mentioning. First, the company is bringing in professionals from Pivotal Labs to help solve its downtime problems. Second, Twitter’s CEO has said no pay models will be put in place. So we’re looking at something that’s free and actually works . . . good news all around.

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Doug June 6th, 2008

All work and no play may result in dullness, but all work and all play is liable to result in insanity.  So Twitter is “adding the ability for users to separate their contacts into groups, support for sending and receiving messages by e-mail, and adding new instant-message and Internet channels for the service,” according to what Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told Mitch Wagner.  Sounds nifty, although reliable uptime would be a better present.

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Doug May 23rd, 2008

Oft-repeated rumor has it that $15 million in funding will soon wind up in Twitter’s corporate pocket.  In fact, some reports have it landing there already.  But regardless of the timeframe, Peter Kafka reports that Spark Capital is the likely source of the investment, and the money should put Twitter at an overall value of around $80 million.  Maybe now the site will actually stay up for a week at a time.

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Doug February 1st, 2008

If you’re tired of Twitter’s outages, take note: they may cease to occur.  And if they do continue, there will at least be a different name associated with them, as Twitter has ditched its hosting provider, Joyent. The new provider is called Verio, and only time and not-plummeting user numbers will tell if things have finally improved.

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Tim April 5th, 2007

Stan over at FranticIndustries has posted an impressive list of Twitter Tools, Mashups, Plugins, and Clients. The size of the list only reflects the amount of interest gathering over such a relatively simple idea (that still creeps me out for the record).

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