The board of directors at Twitter has been shaken up. Two high-profile investors Bijan Sabet and Fred Wilson are leaving the company board of directors. Twitter’s chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury is also stepping down.

Twitter CTO Greg Pass has left the company. Pass was the VP of Engineering at Twitter and was the co-founder of Summize. Summize is a Twitter search engine that was acquired by the micro-blogging company in July 2008. Summize is now the basis of Twitter Search.

Twitter is gaining traction at an alarming rate.  The company has $55 million in funding and the user base is growing by the millions.  Twitter users include celebrities, politicians, VCs, surgeons, entrepreneurs, etc.  One of Twitter’s biggest features is their search engine.  Thousands of people are using it everyday to find the latest topic trends.  Earlier today Twitter Search was added to the homepage of several limited users.

“Searching over Twitter messages is like a filter for what is happening right now—it’s an interesting look into the real-time thoughts of people and organizations around the world,” stated Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. “Whether you’re curious about something specific or you just want to browse the trending topics, we’ve found that Twitter Search adds a new layer of relevance.”

All I can say is that Twitter may be a good search engine for people to use to find news about trends.  After all people reporting news may be a better source than any algorithm can put together.  I think we may have found a legitimate Google News competitor.

Twitter Search was created after the company acquired Summize.

Everyone’s favorite fail-whale, micro-blogging company, Twitter bought Summize today.  The transaction was paid mostly in stock.  Summize was basically a search engine for Twitter conversations.  When a topic became popular on Twitter, Summize would list them on the bottom.  

Here is a before and after picture of Summize:

Before (Note: Summize is highlighted in yellow because I grabbed the screenshot from the cached page on Google) 

After

Through the acquisition, Twitter will be hiring 5 out of 6 of the Summize engineers.  The Summize engineers will be moving to San Francisco.  Greg Pass, Summize’s CTO will become Twitter’s Director of Engineering and Ops.  Maybe Summize will help get rid of the fail whale and make it more of a success whale.

Related Links:
Silicon Alley Insider
Twitter
Summize (Now known as Twitter Search)