Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Twitter is Humpty Dumpty








Well, humpty dumpty sat on a wall…you know how it goes. In the never ending Twitter story of humpty dumpty, we got replies back a few days ago. And from what I’ve heard, many people got used to Summize and are happier with Summize. The search engine offers many more features than the replies tab. As Matt Dickman said in his blog, Summize scores an A+ for these great features:




  • · Real time polling for new tweets

  • · Logical tie-ins to Twitter (send to Twitter, links back to messages, etc.)

  • · RSS subscriptions

  • · Good up-time (not hard to do compared to Twitter itself)


Steve Gillmor of TechCrunchIT gives a great explanation of how they do it, Apparently the great folks at Summize have still been given access to Twitter’s XMPP stream which it had been previously believed shut down to all developers. Apparently all developers are not equal as it was determined that some developer’s apps like Summize provided a great deal of value to the widest audience possible at least cost to the overburdened Twitter infrastructure. Sounds like George Orwell’s Animal Farm where all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. Or it’s good to be the pig, or in this case, Summize.



Now, since we’re talking animal stories, about that old humpty dumpty, Twitter. In the never ending quest to put humpty back together again, what will we get back (IM, track, better API limits?) and what will come crashing down. Hopefully, all the king's horses and all the king's men will do a better job this time around.