It'll take more than sparrows
to lift Twitter's whale

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos paired with Spark Capital to inject funds into Twitter, whose downtime increases as membership expands, reports BusinessWeek.

Twitter enables users to publish "microblogs" of up to 140 characters, making it a favored medium for sharing ideas, eliciting feedback, seeding blog posts and posting idle thoughts.

Co-founder Biz Stone said the financial infusion will give the site "some runway and breathing room" as it pursues a "piece by piece" technology upgrade. Following the recent departures of its chief architect and VP of engineering, Twitter opted to abandon Ruby on Rails, the trendy web framework upon which it was built in 2006.

Rebuilding foundational architecture will be a delicate operation for a site of Twitter's age, size and bandwidth demand, but failure to do so may cost its future. (Some Twitterati have begun experimenting with Plurk, a rival service with more features and less downtime.)

Stone says the transition is in progress and "will take months to complete."

Image credit: Florian Boyd.