Recently active discussions in Twitter tagged with update

To quote the September Newsletter:

"Twitter has been making great progress in terms of uptime and
reliability. Fail Whale sightings are far less frequent these
days thanks to our efforts but we still have a long journey
ahead. Last month we saw 99.88% uptime and so far this month we
are at 99.96%."

I'll be frank, uptime is only going to get you so far. I've been checking the status blog since the original issues back in May. Its now september. The pop overs on Track and IM haven't changed since June or so. IM needs more capacity, track needs reworking. Frankly track was one of the best things out there. Great for companies to track their name, great to track events in my area, and of course track my name being said. IM made it easy to get those updates on my desktop instead of my phone. Yet it seems twitter has all but abandoned these two in favor of the almighty Up time. Has anything really happened with them or have they been sitting in the back closet like the favorite toy you no longer care for?

When I specify a track word, does the Twitter system then apply this filter to the updates posted ONLY by the people I follow or does Twitter use the word being tracked to retrieve the updates posted by anyone who is a Twitter user?
I hope that it's the former. In other words, I hope that tracking allows you to be notified about updates posted by people you follow BUT ONLY when they post something with the track word.
If it it's the latter then it loses its value because you could get an update from someone you do not want to follow and have no interest in.

I'm trying to update Twitter . When I send a new txt message (not a reply) it doesn't work. Is that normal?

I expected to be able to txt directly to the international number but posting via sms(txt) does not work.