As has been rumoured for some time now, Twitter has closed a financing round — and with some all-star money types, including Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital — although no one is saying how much the round was (rumours continue to be $15-million), or what the valuation placed on the company is. All that aside, the big question is whether it’s going to be able to fix what is broken at Twitter, and — assuming it can — whether people are willing to wait around until that gets done. For the past couple of months, the downtime at Twitter has been far higher than virtually any other social-media tool I can think of, and there has been a constant stream of people either leaving for Jaiku or Pownce, or moving their social graph to FriendFeed and elsewhere.
As Mike Arrington said awhile back at TechCrunch, it’s possible that Twitter has become so central to some people’s online behaviour patterns that it almost doesn’t matter how much it goes down, because people will bitch and moan about it — and then get right back on Twitter and complain about how much it goes down. I for one hope that Ev and Biz and the team are busy building a completely separate architecture they can migrate the service over to at some point, because I think Twitter has established a clear place in the world of social media, and not just as a conversational or ego-stroking tool, but also as a news delivery mechanism. I would hate to see that go to waste.