Steve, you must have missed the news – Twitter has brought track back. It’s even called track: http://staynalive.com/articles/2009/06/21/track-is-back-steve-gillmor-rejoices/

Why say in 3625 characters or more what can easily be said in 140?! Think what you meant to say was:

Y 140chrs=enuf: @davewiner sez 140!=enuf but usd 2 say its gud. Twitr = like paintng, recrding, artficaly-imposd cnstrnt lead 2 grtr cr8ivty

Eight track tape was eventually replaced by the inferior cassette due to advances in the quality of cassettes and their more convenient size.

Track will be replaced (or become) an open standard and open market for gesture filtering.

What I mean to say is that information is a commodity, but a good filter (formerly known as an editor) is not and the explosion of information that can and will be tracked requires such a filter.

Convenience and quality rule, but this market is just at the beginnings of its creation.

I’m not sure I’d consider a feature in alpha that’s only available to a hand-picked set of development partners “back”. I’ll consider it “back” when users can use it again.

Awesome. Get @gillmorIn140 an keep shortening his stuff

I like your comment about Track, “It was more that it represented the horizon, the frontier, the lack of boundaries.” I’ve never had the chance to use this feature, but the concept of subscribing to text messages based on topics or search terms is alive in TipTop, which is currently using Twitter search APIs. For example, a search on TipTop for “Techcrunch” http://www.feeltiptop.com/techcrunch/ not only provides constantly live search and relevent results for all the Tips (positive messages) and Pits (comments with negative sentiment) related to the search terms, you can also filter the thousands of messages by related concepts and categories. TipTop is pushing the envelope in this respect.

Greg Martin

url shorteners are much older than twitter.
e.g. tinyurl was launched in 2002.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TinyURL