I personally didn't find them slow before. What I /did/ find is that they were useless: you can only search a reasonably recent time period, and all search results (even things like @mentions to your own account) get hard-limited after 800 results. I'd much rather they didn't get faster but simply became more useful. As it is, finding "important" tweets based on search terms works better using Google than using Twitter.<p>I mean: if you have a lot of people talking to you (maybe you just released a new version of a product that has over ten million users) it can actually become impossible to see what people are saying because it falls over the 800 window. I seriously got frustrated one day and wrote a program to log tweets sent to me so I wouldn't lose them. :(