I guess this explains the problems we have been having with our Twitterment search engine for Twitter: Amazon S3 Down.

Here at Ebiquity, we’ve had a number of great grad students. One of them, Akshay Java, hacked out a search engine for twitter posts around early April last year, and named it twitterment. He blogged about it here first. He did it without the benefit of the XMPP updates, by parsing the public timeline. It got talked about in the blogosphere, (including by Scoble), got some press, and there was an article in the MIT Tech review that used his visualization of some of the twitter links. It even got talked about in Wired’s blog, something we found out only yesterday. We were also told that three days after the post in Wired’s blog, someone somewhere registered the domain twitterment.com (I won’t feed them pagerank by linking!), and set up a page that looks very similar to Akshay’s. It has Google Adsense, and of course just passes the query to Google with a site restriction to twitter. So they’re poaching coffee and cookie money from the students in our lab

So of course we played with Akshay’s hack, hosted it on one of our university boxes for a few months, but didn’t really have the bandwidth or compute (or time) resources to keep up. Startups such as summize appeared later and provided similar functionality. For the last week or two we’ve  been moving the code of twitterment to Amazon’s cloud to restart the service. Of course, today comes the news that twitter might buy summize, quasi confirmed by Om Malik. Lesson to you grad students — if you come up with something clever, file an invention disclosure with your university’s tech transfer folks. And don’t listen to your advisors if they think that there isn’t a paper in what you’ve hacked — there may yet be a few million dollars in it

The Personal Democracy Forum is sponsoring a twitter debate tonight on “technology and government” between representatives of Barack Obama and John McCain to be moderated by Time magazine blogger Anna Marie Cox. A note on PDF has the details:

“The McCain campaign will be represented by Liz Mair, the online communications director of the Republican National Committee. The Obama campaign will be represented by Mike Nelson, a professor at Georgetown University who served in the Clinton White House under Vice President Gore on tech policy issues. He is an outside advisor to Obama’s campaign on issues of technology, media and telecommunications.”

Of course, it remains to be seen what kind of debate can happen if short taking points are further compressed into 140 character tweeting points. It will be an interesting experiment.

“Mike, Liz and Ana will be using their personal Twitter accounts, @mikenelson, @lizmair and @anamariecox, and we’ve also asked them to tag their responses with the hashtag #pdfdebate. We suggest that readers who want to follow along use a Twitter application like Summize.com to track the conversation.”

The debate will start sometime tonight (Friday 20 June) and is expected to run through the end of the conference on Tuesday 24 June and maybe beyond.

MarsPhoenix is twittering from the North polar region of Mars.

Here’s a great picture of my deployed arm with the scoop on the end: http://tinyurl.com/3s354p I can’t wait to dig in the dirt next week. 10:14 PM May 29, 2008 from web

Phoenix is even carrying on conversations with some of its more than 10,000 followers.

@infoholic Yup, I can dig into frozen ground as hard as concrete. The scoop has special blades and a powered “rasp” to scrape ice. Cool! 11:09 PM May 29, 2008 from web in reply to infoholic

My first thought was that I wouldn’t want to be there when NASA gets the cell phone bill for little Phoenix. But then I read the story in the NYT, Phoenix to Earthlings: I’ve Landed! Awesome!, and found that,like a lot of important entities, Phoenix has people who do this for it.

“For users of Twitter, a Web microblogging service, the Phoenix Mars lander has been sending pithy news “tweets” to the cellphones and computers of interested ‘followers.’ As of late Friday, the Phoenix lander had 9,636 followers at Twitter, more than triple the number of a week earlier. According to twitterholic.com, it ranks No. 30 among all Twitter feeds in the solar system.
…
Of course, the messages are not coming from Mars. Instead, Veronica McGregor, the news services manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., has been playing the part of Phoenix each night after she gets home from work, forwarding questions to the science team and then posting answers.”