All Things Digital

OK, I like Twitter a lot, but what is up with all this tech news coverage of its outages?

With the Twitter service being glitchy all weekend, for example, the jump-to-the-next-big-thing champ Robert Scoble wrote another piece yesterday smacking his old amour and praising his new love: FriendFeed.

You know, the new pretty young thing in Silicon Valley (ex-Googlers involved make it hotter still!).

You don’t know?

Neither does most of the human race, in truth, which is just getting around to noticing Facebook and maybe, just maybe, figuring out how to properly use a SuperPoke (my advice: never ever!).

And, while Twitter is amazing in many ways, its tech glitches don’t deserve this level of emergency alarms.

But that has not stopped the echo chamber of Silicon Valley from making a lot of really noisy noise about the indignity of it all.

Isn’t there a recent Sarah Lacy interview with some random Web 2.0 player they could egregiously overreact to instead?

In a weird way, though, this reminds me of the outrage when AOL (TWX) went down for 19 hours in August of 1996. (To date myself, I was actually at AOL HQ in Virginia at that very time with CEO Steve Case, working on my first book.)

At the time, AOL’s 6.3 million users had their first collective digital nervous breakdown and the outage resulted in national headlines–as well as later governmental investigations–across the nation.

“If this (outage) is a sign that AOL can’t handle its growth, that’s a very bad message for the professionals that use it,” Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications, said ominously to CNN at the time.

Now, 6.3 million users over a decade ago in today’s terms is a lot more in comparison to Twitter’s current users.

But the difference: Today, one single person like Scoble can tweet louder than millions can complain and it sounds like it is exactly the same thing.

Yesterday, you could feel the testiness jump right over the phone from several people close to Microsoft whom I spoke to about Yahoo’s latest gambit to sell its blue-sky growth plan to Wall Street.

Like a lot of Yahoo’s various moves of late–dating promiscuously with other suitors, handing out pricey severance plans to all employees and continuing to spurn the advances of the software giant without a raise in its $31-a-share bid–the projections by Yahoo (YHOO) that its sunny future warranted at least $40 a share were not taken well in Redmond.

In fact, the company–although it may ultimately have to–is quite adamant about not raising the price. “Sooner or later, they’ll run out of things to do,” said one Microsoft (MSFT) exec.

Sooner would be better, as paying $40 a share would add about $12 billion more the the $41 billion price tag, which would make it one of the biggest tech mergers in history if consummated.

But for the same high, high price, why not take all that money and buy AOL and the giant media conglomerate attached to it?

Yes, I mean Time Warner! Home of AOL and Harry Potter!

This thought occurred to me as I watched the stock of Time Warner (TWX) drift further downward over the last weeks, even though it has tried to give itself a shot in the digital arm by paying $850 million in cash to buy the Bebo social network.

Current price tag for the whole ball of TWX: $51.5 billion. (Of course, debt brings the price up to about $85 billion to $87 billion, but this is just a fantasy, so indulge me.)

And for that you not only get the relatively decent AOL online ad network, you also get a social network in Bebo (No. 3, but Microsoft has only a tiny piece of Facebook), the powerful AIM instant messaging service, a just-as-famous brand name in need of some TLC, some nice Web properties and, best of all, a chance to shove out Google (GOOG) from its search-ad relationship with AOL (Google owns 5% of the unit, which it bought for $1 billion).

Plus, all kinds of stuff you can either keep or spin off: powerful cable assets, top-notch television and movie studios (those cool “Entourage” guys on HBO!), the biggest magazine company (People, Sports Illustrated!), cable networks (Anderson Cooper and Larry King on CNN) and much, much more.

Frankly, compared to Yahoo, Time Warner kind of feels like a bargain, and they know from getting taken over by digital types.

Years ago, as I reported in my book, “aol.com,” Microsoft Co-Founder and longtime leader Bill Gates once said to AOL Founder and then-CEO Steve Case in 1993: “I can buy 20% of you or I can buy all of you. Or I can go into this business myself and bury you.”

How ironic would it be if that promise finally came true?