This is a very short list :)
It's just the tools I use personally.
In a techcrunch post Michael Arrington breaks the news that Gnip now gets the full Twitter PubSub Feed and all developers can access it via Gnip's API.
Twitter's top managers stated earlier that they are worried about if it's safe to give away the full feed and in the Twitter Development Talk group they Alex mentioned that if the XMPP feed would be given to anybody it would require an additional contract that would prohibit resyndicatíon of this content. Currently only a few sites were given access to to this feed including FriendFeed that is actually building a competitor to Twitter on top of this feed.
I really think it's a great move as Twitter actually keeps the control over the feed as it can still cut any site from using it and it can cut Gnip in case it wouldn't be able to block the sites that abuse the feed usage.
For all the developers it's simply great, because that would allow us to provide updates to users in real time handling all the communication with the end-user from own servers without pushing the API calls to their limits. The Twitter API would serve to get the additional protected information.
I still didn't see a company that did the work with 3d party developers right. Google's i-home is a tutorial on how the work with developers shouldn't be done, Facebook lets crappy apps win the popularity race without supporting the apps that create user value and Twitter is navigating the waters that has high storm risk. And I really think Twitter should help some small apps and bots get some popularity advertising them inside Twitter. I know some absoultelly great Twitter aps that will never get very popular, but are really valuable and need some help in promotion.
stevekinney: Twitter – who makes no money – just paid for a service that made no money (Summize). Maybe everything I thought is wrong.
Great news for all Twitter developers: Twitter will extend the possibilities of the current API with search functionality from summize. Summize.com now redirects to search.twitter.com and as I understand we will soon see a change in the Twitter UI also.
If you need detailed info Alex Payne answers some questions about the acquisition in this post.
Why is this important?
Some applications were already using Summize API, but it's really tricky to count on a 3d party API as it can shut doors or change rules any time it wants. As it is now the part of Twitter developers can count on it and use it, so expect a lot of interesting search and tracking apps to appear in the future.
Threaded @conversations?
Summize can currently locate and display dialogs. The real question that I think is important for most of the Twitter community is if summize will offer this feature to 3d party developers via API. Normal conversation tracking is the #1 feature that Twitter really needs. After Twitter has shut the "PubSub" for most of developers it is impossible to make something like quotably.com without a special "yes" for Twitter, so the search API is the only hope to get this done.
Michael Arrington's interview with Evan Williams:
you can read the full post at techcrunch.
The news about a man getting out from jail helped twitter to get to it's peak of 0.14% reach on the 3d of June. However it has fallen back to 0.06 right now and that's even lower then it was before the news. The fact is that Twitter can't keep the acquired mainstream traffic because it lacks some features that are vital for such a service. Even a simple HTML page with tips whom to follow could make a difference. There are tons of interesting bots and bloggers on twitter but it's really hard to find them.
As for other competitors - they won't see any light anyway.
You can see the Alexa's traffic graph here.
As Alex Payne stated here:
We're attempting to get back to 70 requests per hour this week. We've just now raised the limit to 40 per hour and things are holding steady. If all continues to go well, we should be back to 70 today or tomorrow. We'll try to keep it there barring special events that are announced ahead of time.
