If they brought back Track, Twitter would be a multi-billion dollar company overnight. If they don’t do it, someone will and that’s when we’ll see the commercial side of micro-blogging make sense (cents).

Google News Alerts for Twitter?
Yeppers.

I see Twitter is very much a platform that’s open to more collaborative apps + add-ons, much like WordPress.

What will be interesting is if Twitter can engage and incorporate third party apps like TweetDeck, analytics/stats providers as partners, vs merely buying them out. It’ll move them up the development curve faster, give users a better quality experience with a shorter development lifecycle, etc, etc.

There’s only 1,000 things they could bring back.

Oh, and I don’t know how well their mindshare will translate into long term commercial sustainability.

Aside from that, it’s perfect.

Internet years is subjective i guess.

By that measure, Hotmail and Yahoo! mail might be decrepit.

If they buy bit.ly, i expect some type of fallout among the other URL shortening services.

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Will be interesting how they construct storehouses of relevant data in real time. Like I said, if they manage to conquer this mountainous challenge, they’d be standing on top of the heap.

Goodness knows we’ve seen enough fail whales to last us for a while.

Some of us have been on Twitter since the good ole days of ’06. That’s middle-aged for web startups!

I still think they are going to buy bit.ly and run all links through that service (which does allow for API integration, stats, etc… so you could build a search engine on top of that) but not go the direct “indexing of all links” route.

No reason to re-invent the Google Pagerank wheel with authority, etc (and the subsequent headaches and industries it has created).

Sam