Yet more news on the Twitter front.
First off, there was a minor crisis in the Twittosphere when someone noticed direct messages (ie, one-to-one private messages) appearing in her public feed. Not good, though the culprit was later identified to be a third-party client called GroupTweet.
Photo by cambodia4kidsorg on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
Next off, it turns out that lead architect Blaine Cook is leaving the firm to head off to, well, the UK actually. In a carefully worded email to Silicon Alley Insider Cook said "Twitter's architecture is at a good point for them to pursue stability and growth, and I'm looking forward to a new challenge". The combination of his departure and recent outages on the service have caused speculation that he was sacked from Valleywag, and a rather more severe FAIL from TechCrunch; Mike Arrrington said Cook had mostly failed in his remit of scaling the service. But then they just need someone to blame.
The site launched a Japanese version last night that includes ads on the Twitter profile pages of brands with corporate feeds, reports CNET. Joi Ito's Digital Garage, who led the Japanese launch, said it is easier to launch with ads than to add them later. He also pointed to the volume of tweet coming from Tokyo on Monday: 28,874 compared to 14,348 from San Francisco. Japanese users will be able to choose, therefore, whether to use a domestic version with ads or a global English version without.
That said, perhaps Twitter is about to see a downturn. A combination of frustrating downtime and the new, mighty Friendfeed seem to turning the tide a little.
Friendfeed combines feeds from Twitter with Flickr, del.icio.us, Digg, Last.fm and a bunch of other social media tools, tapping a very well-observed desire to have all this stuff in one central place. Alert Thingy is already offering a desktop tool
Let's just sit back and wait for outages on Friendfeed instead then, as it buckles under the weight of the early adopters jumping on board.
