Twitter Down, World Stops

Today Twitter went down at 14:00 (2 PM) Pacific for sched­uled main­te­nance. During that time, the world stopped for many Twitter users–and not just for the no-life, shut-in kind of Twitter users.

Users were alert­ed to the impend­ing out­age days before via tweet, and all day of the out­age via the Twitter user inter­face. No one real­ly thought it would be a big deal. But it is.

Chris Brogan:

I’m scan­ning blogs in Google Reader, and I find this arti­cle about giv­ing good return on atten­tion. I like it. I hit Shift+S to share it via Google read­er, which push­es it along to FriendFeed, which con­nects to my Facebook, but then, I decide to share it in Twitter, and I real­ize we’re in sched­uled downtime.

The moment I real­ize this, I get itchy. I want to share. I want to exchange infor­ma­tion. I want to see whether peo­ple find that infor­ma­tion use­ful. That last part’s the big one: did some­one see the tweet, find it inter­est­ing, and retweet it or share it in some oth­er way?

I share Chris’s frus­tra­tion. At this very moment I have numer­ous tabs of inter­est­ing con­tent sit­ting impo­tent, wait­ing to be shared with my fol­low­ers via Twitter. Even as my inbox fills up with alerts about new posts and com­ments on Facebook, where only an hour ago those notices came from Twitter, I stare help­less­ly at my open tabs, unable to share, unable to con­tribute to the community!

Kitty Florido

Thinking it’s fun­ny [Facebook] is now serv­ing as the back­up place to post tweets…

Erica OGrady:

Haha – so where shall the über-connected geeks like us run? Plurk? Facebook? Friendfeed? FourSquare? Maybe grab a book or take a walk?

Melanie Phung

Not that I can’t live with­out Twitter (I can quit any­time I want to, hon­est!), but seri­ous­ly who does “sched­uled main­te­nance” right smack in the mid­dle of the day? It’s just not the same on Facebook.

Now that FriendFeed is dri­ven large­ly by Twitter oAuth logins, it can’t func­tion well while Twitter is down either. With the demise of Twitter rivals Pownce and Rejaw, there are no use­ful microblog­ging ser­vices that can serve as Twitter back­ups. Facebook, it seems, is the geeks’ back­up social media, albeit reluctantly.

In a world that is increas­ing­ly becom­ing defined by 140 char­ac­ters, is there life with­out Twitter? Has it become “I tweet, there­fore I am”? And, if one can­not tweet, does one there­fore no longer exist?