• Los Angeles Times, Wednesday, June 25, 2008 11 AM

Twitter, the microblogging phenomenon whose simple call-to-action, "what are you doing?" is revolutionizing the way people communicate, this week closed a long-rumored round of funding led by Spark Capital and Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos. The $15 million round values the company-which has no revenue model-at just under $100 million.

Part of the cash windfall will be used to make the service more reliable, as Twitter is notoriously prone to outages. As TechCrunch's Michael Arrington once wrote, "They are the only service I know of where users rejoice when they simply manage to keep their service live." Twitter had 1.2 million unique users in May.

Is Twitter really changing the way people communicate? According to a new survey from Harris Interactive, people are moving away from email towards other forms of online communication because 59% say there is more immediacy, 52% say there is more interchange, 48% say there is more impact, and 46% say it feels more casual and intimate than email.

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