Twitter has been using TinyURL for its own URL shortening needs. Up until now, that is. As several sites have noticed, Twitter has silently replaced TinyURL with bit.ly. TechCrunch doesn’t find that very surprising, naming Betaworks as common ground for both bit.ly and now Twitter-owned Summize.

Will Twitter buy bit.ly next? They should, the fact that they’ve been relying on external infrastructure for their URL shortening needs this long is surprising.

Have you searched for comments about you or your blog on Twitter? Have you ever wondered what people are saying about you?

There is a lot you can learn by searching Twitter and monitoring popular keywords and topics. For following trends, it’s invaluable.

How to Track Keywords and Search Terms in Twitter

There are a variety of ways to track what people are saying about you and other topics. Twitscoop tracks the most popular keywords on Twitter, and features a search option. It returns a summary of the latest tweets with those terms. You can click a link to get a chart displaying the frequency and timing of the search term, giving you a visual image of the rise and fall of specific terms on Twitter. read more

The rumors were true, Twitter has acquired Summize, and not only that, they also launched a new search page for you to play with.

Summize is a popular service for searching Twitter and keeping up with emerging trends in real-time. Like Twitter, Summize offers an API so other products and services can filter the constant queue of updates in a variety of ways. The Summize service and API will be merged with our own and integrated under the Twitter brand.

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