Twitter is growing up and, like an adult, is beginning to desire consistent guarantees about its data rather than instant availability.

At least that's the emphasis placed by the company on its new "Manhattan" data management software, a bedrock storage system that was revealed in a blog post on Wednesday.

What's not mentioned is that Twitter is developing something it calls secondary indexes, The Register can reveal. This is a potentially powerful feature within Manhattan that will give its employees greater flexibility over how they search through the social network's vast stores of data, arming the publicly listed company with another weapon for its commercial endeavors.