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)

Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) have announced that they have joined Twitter’s Board. It was not revealed before today that Jeff Bezos was an investor in Twitter’s rumored $15 million third round of funding [GigaOm].

“Existing partners Union Square Ventures in New York City and Tokyo-based Digital Garage exercised their pro rata rights to participate in this round as well,” wrote Twitter founder, Evan Williams on the Twitter blog.

Twitter chose Bijan because he is a man that understands the direction of Twitter.  Bijan is “super excited about the possibilities.”  Bezos was selected because he is a seasoned veteran and because he is a source of inspiration for Twitter.

“Jeff’s attention to business process details and distinctive, ‘honk-like laugh’ are similarly admirable traits as far as we’re concerned,” added Williams.

Feedburner has a small button that bloggers can place on their websites to show off how many people subscribe to their RSS feed.  Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, co-editor at TheNextWeb.org has developed TwitterCounter.com which shows off how many Twitter followers you have.

“At the first Next Web conference, Michael Arrington said he didn’t pay attention to pageviews anymore. For him, it was all about RSS readers. Back then, RSS had just became popular. That was a real eye-opener. From that day on, I have been trying to increase the number of RSS readers on my blogs,” stated Boris ”But recently, I asked my (editors note: 1449) Twitter followers why some of them hadn’t subscribed to the Next Web Blog RSS feed. I got a lot of replies from people, most of them saying they were happy enough with the blog’s Twitter feed. That was another eye-opener for me.”

Given the cultural obsession wrapped around the Twitter culture, I can imagine how fast TwitterCounter will grow quickly.  But from what I learned, placing the same company name of the service that a company depends on is not a smart move.  Alexaholic is an example.  The actual design of TwitterCounter.com looks too similar to Twitter also, it needs a fix.

A feature I like about TwitterCounter is that it tracks follower growth over the course of a week.  This allows Twitter users to monitor how interesting their mini-blog posts and messages on Twitter.

Below is a sample of what TwitterCounter looks like for my Twitter profile:

Information Source:
[1] TheNextWeb.org: Twittercounter: Feedburner for Twitter by Ernst-Jan Pfauth

Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter interviewed with Mitch Wagner yesterday regarding what is coming up in the pipeline with mini-blogging company.  Twitter is going to add the ability to separate contacts into different groups, receive messages via email, and add an IM feature.  So you’ll be able to create a group for “People That Cause Twitter Outages” and add Robert Scoble to that group.

“We’ve been adding some databases and hardware and tweaking our schema to take a lot of load off the main database,” stated Dorsey. “We’ve seen some improvements in the last few days, and we’re making sure we make a good record of stability before we turn on IM, which is a popular service and will increase the load.”

The outages were caused by instant growth of Twitter and the servers couldn’t handle the load.  Dare Obasajno, Program Manager at Microsoft has an interesting take on Twitter’s scaling issues.  Dare’s blog post states, will Twitter be the next Friendster?  Friendster has had numerous problems with scaling, thus paving the way for Facebook to rise and dominate social networking market share.

“Any massive user is going to make the system work, certainly,” added Dorsey. “The way we originally designed the architecture, and the way the system is designed right now, we have various pain points.” Popular Twitter users create a chain reaction — when they update, their followers are more likely to update, too, leading to usage surges. “When you get an update from a friend, you are likely to update as well,” he said. “We have to design the system for that kind of flash-mob behavior.”

Twitter hired Steve Jensen and John Kalucki to help with scaling the site.  Jensen worked at Blogger and Blogger was started by Twitter co-founder, Ev Williams.  Blogger was acquired by Google 5 years ago.

Personally I never really got into Twitter until the last couple of months.  But now I’m addicted to it.  You may find me subscribing to many people as I find the content appearing on the homepage to be very interesting such as Neha Tiwari getting laid off at Revision3.   Add me on Twitter.

Information Sources:
[1] InformationWeek: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: Improved Uptime Is Top Priority by Mitch Wagner
[2] Mashable: Twitter Is Working on Groups by Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins

Twitter, the quick blogging tool that allows users to write what they are doing in 140 characters per less through messenger software, mobile phones, and on the web has supposedly raised $15 million.  The $15 million puts Twitter at a valuation at $80 million.  An unnamed investor led the round and participated with previous investor, Union Square Ventures.  With this round of funding, that puts Twitter at above $20 million in total funding.

The new investor is suspected to be Spark Capital.  Some of the hints that lead to Spark Capital being the new invesot is that Bijan Sabet was in San Francisco visiting “a very special company.”  Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter also “Tweeted” that he was “Walking down Newberry St.” in Boston, Mass. which is where Spark Capital is based.

Keep reading Pulse 2.0 as the story develops.

Information Sources:
[1] GigaOM: Twitter VC Funding Done. Raises $15 MM by Om Malik
[2] TechCrunch: Highly Likely Rumor: Twitter Closes Third Round Of Financing From Spark Capital by Michael Arrington

Earlier today, Yahoo! started handing out their layoff notices to those who were affected by Yahoo!’s budget cuts.  The most interesting response I’ve seen so far was that of Ryan Kuder who Twittered the whole incident live.  Below are his Twitters.  The story was originally announced by Alley Insider and is being tracked on Techmeme. 

Despite how bad the economy is doing, its interesting to see how many of those who were let go from Yahoo! remain optimistic.  Yahoo! is an innovative company and manages some of the top technology experts, so those laid off shouldn’t have a hard time bouncing back.  Any thoughts?  Comment away. 

 

Today voters in 24 states are choosing their favorite presidential party candidates.  Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the Democratic Party and John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, and Ron Paul for the Republican Party.  Many states have already decided who they have picked based on vote tallies. 

Throughout the voting process, Americans were Twittering what their voting experiences were like.  And as they were Twittering, their profile would appear in a bubble on the Google Super Tuesday Map.  Google has been playing an interesting role throughout the entire presidential process.  YouTube was used for asking questions at the various debates, including questions asked by a snowman.

Below is a screen shot of the Google Super Tuesday Map in action:

[Information Source: Official Google Blog]

I have to admit, I don’t often see myself reading Robert Scoble’s blog, Scobleizer. However, I admit that I read the man’s twitters. Why do I read his twitters? Because I believe that he is an influential person in tech. And I wouldn’t be able to read his twitters if he decided to follow me but I chose not to follow him.

So when I logged into Netvibes and I saw my Twitter subscriptions RSS feed saying that Scoble wrote on Twitter: “The real power of Twitter is in FOLLOWING, not being followed,” I just had to contemplate what that meant. And what I interepret that twitter by Scoble meant was that essentially information is power. And you have to seek it. It won’t come to you.

Thought provoking.

“I hate when I hop over to valleywag for a brief bit of guilty time-wasting and run into posts about me,” wrote Evan Williams on his latest Twitter message.

I just joined Twitter last week and I’m already addicted to letting the world know what the hell I’m up to. I believe what Williams is referring to is a follow-up of Valleywag’s post that refers to whether Twitter users will be receptive to the latest tips (or some speculate to be the placeholder for ads).

Charlie O’Donnell wrote that he received a message from Twitter saying Tip: Wow, you look *good.* “If successful (or if the users are silent) you would imagine that its only a matter of time before this becomes: Tip: Drink Jamba Juice,” continued O’Donnell.

Personally, I could care less whether Twitter places ads in mobile text messages. After all, we have the option to disable mobile notifications. And just like Google, the company has to make money the only way they know how. Look at the net worth of advertising companies out there. Seeing as how the advertising market is worth billions of dollars and is the reason why GOOGLE IS OVER $600 PER SHARE RIGHT NOW, take advantage.

[Note: Mo Kakwan of Blabberize insisted I create an account. I found a new time-waster, thanks a lot buddy! *thumbs up*]