The End of the World as We Know It

Unless you were living on another planet yesterday, you probably heard about the Twitter outage, which was apparently caused by a denial-of-service attack.  A quick Google search turned up 7,580,000 web results and 1,131 news stories on the topic.  (Of course, those statistics are completely meaningless, but I include them here as a nod to clueless journalists everywhere.)

The Associated Press, in a rare moment of attempted humor, reported that “the outage meant no tweeting about lunch plans, the weather or the fact that Twitter was down.”  Hundreds of other news sources had more dire pronouncements. Business Week featured a story about the impact on U.S. business, but one of my favorites was from a Jacksonville, Fla., TV station that focused on how a local PR firm “panicked” when Twitter went down.  Included in this piece was a weighty quote from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: “The use of Twitter is a very important one not only to the Iranian people, but also now to people around the world.”

There were stories and posts about the withdrawal symptoms of Twitter users, including this one from a blogger at  Richmond.com who admits to “freaking out a little bit.”  I even saw a poll on Twitter yesterday asking “where I went” when Twitter was down, e.g. Facebook, etc.  (I said “lunch.”)

Don’t get me wrong.  Twitter, Facebook, and all the other social networking apps can be important communication tools.  But with the information overload we have to deal with, maybe it’s a good thing we all got to take a break yesterday.  Maybe we should stop just for a minute and think about what life would be like without Twitter.   I think we’d survive.  Might be something to consider if Twitter ever figures out how to “monetize” its business model and starts charging users for its service.