Twitter^[1] has started to use Google's SPDY^[2] protocol for handling web requests from browsers that understand the alternative to HTTP. Although not formally announced, a Twitter engineer posted^[3] a screenshot showing that the protocol was enabled on Twitter's API. SPDY started life in 2009 as an experiment^[4] to speed up the web by using one request instead of multiple HTTP requests and enabling encryption and compression by default. Google introduced SPDY in Chrome and Chromium and then to many Google web sites.

The protocol has been submitted^[5] to the IETF as a possible future standard. The use of the protocol on Twitter is the first major deployment outside Google, other than

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