• You start Tweetdeck before you start your web browser.
• You look for a Twitter @username before you look for a website.
• You DM before you e-mail.
• You check the Twitscoop cloud before you check the web for breaking news.
• You can’t decide whether to auto-tweet from your post or auto-post from your tweet. Bonus points if you can do both.
• You do not know how many applications are linked to your Twitter account.
• You know that @GuyKawasaki is auto-posting but you follow him anyway for reasons you cannot explain.
• You have stopped trying to explain Twitter to anyone.

I’m not a sports guy, never have been, so the fact that yesterday was the Super Bowl had little effect on me, other than my interest in those ads that we hear so much about. Last night, as I was catching up on news as the second and third quarters played out, I watched the tweets come across my screen, people talking about the Cash4Gold commercial or the one for Careerbuilder.com. When the words Baldwin and alien grew to gigantic proportions in the Tweetdeck “Buzzing” cloud, I knew I had to see the ads. However, I though it would be at least a day before they made their way onto the web. Wrong. I received an e-mail from Advertising Age before the game was even over, with a link to their site hosting all the ads. By the way, that link is here.

Also, check out Bob Garfield’s excellent roundup here.

Today, for whatever reason (@tron suggested it was MacWorld) Twitter got unbelievably slow. It didn’t fail, as in days of yore, but it just ceased to update for long stretches, and then only grudgingly. I imagined the tapping on keyboards around the globe as people kept hitting refresh, trying to get some instant gratification, but nothing changed.

I went over to Facebook, which feels like a supermarket now compared to the sparseness of Twitter, and posted a status update. “Wondering what is up with Twitter.” Why? I guess just to connect.

All of which made me wonder, are we too invested in Twitter? When it goes down, do we feel cut off from the world, even though we have e-mail, IM, phones, and at least three computers of varying size within arm’s reach? Is this a good thing?

I have become a great fan of using Twitter as a business tool, and use it much less as a socializing tool. The community I am after in Twitter is specific, occasionally self-referential (i.e., the echo chamber of Social Media), but always highly serendipitous and, hopefully, fruitful. But if that one service goes down, what becomes of our carefully constructed network of follows and followers?

The bright side is that a Twitter downage does not mean lights out on the network. Twitter heightens your availability to become an active node on the network, but once activated, the connections you make carry over into the real world–you know, the one of blogs, wikis, and search marketing! I’m only partly joking. The connections are real, and one can imagine a semblance of the network being reborn of its own will in the event of a permanent Twitter downage, in some other platform or service.

I wonder what other Twitter users think of their dependence (or not) on Twitter and their vulnerability to its notoriously spotty uptime. Are you building out your Twitter connections into non-twitter relationships?

There’s no telling how long this will be possible, so if you’ve been thinking about changing your Twitter username, why not do it in the first week of 2009? There are good reasons for doing this. If you’re like me, your initial impulse was to create an anonymous handle like your old AOL account (e.g., MayorMcCheese), or an abbreviated version of your name ( e.g., mcheese). This helped you get started on Twitter, but it’s now starting to look silly. You’ll notice that many popular Twitter users are using their own names, or a very recognizable version of their names, as their Twitter handle.

The thing is, Twitter is first and foremost a conversation. People just feel better having a conversation with ‘JohnSmith’ as opposed to ‘KlingonRulez,’ plus if you are hoping to use Twitter as a professional or business development tool, you should consider that having a Twitter name that reflects your actual name is part of extending your personal brand.

But you say, ‘I don’t want people to know who I am or what I am saying! What if it comes back to haunt me in the future?’ To that, I can only say that the social web is probably not the place for you. Alias or not, you should only post content you’d be comfortable with your employer or customers reading, and that goes for all media on the internet. Keep it professional and above board, and you will only improve your personal brand.

Now then, down to brass tacks. How do you change your Twitter name? At this time, Twitter doesn’t lock your user name when you set up the account. You can change it right now, but what would happen if someone went looking for your old Twitter page? Your best bet is to create a new account with the old name, but leave one post redirecting people to your new Twitter page. It’s really a shell game, and it goes like this:

1. Create a new account with your new account name. You will need to use a secondary e-mail address. If you are successful, this ensures that your chosen name is available. (E.g., ‘JohnSmith’)
2. Log in to your old Twitter account and go to Settings. Change the Username value to your new chosen name, plus an extra character, like 2. (E.g., ‘JohnSmith2′).
3. Log in to your new Twitter account and change the Username to your old one (E.g., ‘KlingonRulez’). Create a single post that says ‘You can find all my posts at http://twitter.com/[new username].
4. Log in to your old Twitter account and change the Username to your new chosen name by removing the ‘2′ (E.g., ‘JohnSmith’)

That’s it! All your old tweets will be preserved under the new username, and the old one will still be around, pointing people in the right direction.

Either way, Twitter is for real. A bona fide Rule Breaker that’s helping the Web’s wallflowers get social and create network effects on the cheap. And it’ll be made more valuable by a recession that’s forcing firms to spend creatively.

http://www.fool.com/investing/high-growth/2008/11/24/the-recession-could-make-this-company-rich.aspx