Twitter was the very first micro blogging platform that took the internet by storm. Relativly unknown, after demoing their product at a South by South West conference in 2006 it began to steam roll into a social media platform used by hundreds of thousads of people each day.

With Twitters success came some major headaches. When Twitter became popular, they immediately began to run into scalability problems and the service would be down almost as often as it was up. This is partly because the engineers were not prepared for the scale at which it would be adopted, and also partly because it was built using ruby on rails.

However, the technology they have developed cannot be ignored, even with all the problems it comes with. With Twitter looking to buy a company like Summize, they mean business. They realize that they have a product that leaks, but they are prepared to find engineers to patch up those leaks and make it work really well.

When Twitter works, it works really well, and when it breaks we all use FriendFeed instead. One of the things that Twitter has done right is their API. With services like FriendFeed riding off the back of the twitter API, and other services like Ping.fm, and Sendible all providing ‘tweeting’ from outside twitter it doesn’t actually matter if you can get to the web interface or not.

I use Twhirl for my tweeting, and last week they had a a problem and the service went down. I closed Twhirl, and fired up alret thingy and carried on using Twitter. From time to time I send tweets via ping.fm, and rcently I have been using sendible to do future tweets when I have a post going live while I sleep.

So all in all, there are a lot of services that use the Twitter API and I have faith in the guys at twitter, they’ll figure out how to scale their brilliant app, and then it’ll be Twitter FTW!