Twitter recently raised $5 million from Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures but I am still unclear about their business model.
That aside, I am glad to see that the investment is already being put to good use, with the service running much faster since the funding and better still this week twitter announced a couple of new features.
The first is a find feature, which enables you to enter a variety of keywords - name, first or last or both, a location, a URL etc. into the search box (see below) to find new people.
The second find feature is more useful because it allows you to bulk invite people from your GMail account, who are already on twitter. I tried out the service it worked a treat by finding me an additional 154 more people.
Besides my personal twitter account, there is also a professional twitter account for blognation which is simply a river of news from the blognation editors.
The main thing to note is that twitter is finally starting to compete with its nearest rival Jaiku on features. The most requested new feature is groups which would allow you to twitter different messages to different groups. In the absence of an offical twitter “groups” feature, Chris Messina suggested using a # key in a message update to deliniate a group.
August 27th, 2007 at 5:32 am
We’re going to need a TwitterPhone if we keep adding features
A # is easy, but starts to get tricky for non tech users who would likely use spaces and so on typing their groups. Perhaps if #group was the last thing in the message.
August 27th, 2007 at 11:25 am
[…] so happy Twitter is now more user-friendly views”, check out Techmeme. At least, blognation mentions the unclear business […]
September 2nd, 2007 at 3:02 pm
[…] feature please can you let me know? Instead of this pointless rubbish, I wish twitter would focus its recent investment on making its service more […]