Is Twitter Too Much With Us?

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?