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.

Fine, call me a grumpy old lady, because I don’t want to pass around a toasty complex carbohydrate globally.

Right now on Facebook, I have been trying to decide what to do near on two weeks or more, after receiving a “Hot Potato” tossed to me by my old boss, Washington Post Co. CEO and Chairman Don Graham (oh, yes–his family also owns a key hunk of the legendary paper, too).

For those who don’t know what a digital Hot Potato is: It is a widget (also called a third-party app) created by a very nice-looking group of guys at a design outfit called Hungry Machine for the Facebook platform.

“You have to pass it on and watch it travel around the world. 27,012 other people did!”

With all due respect to Don Graham (who is a mentor of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, by the way), Hungry Machine and all world-trotting spuds, I don’t think so.

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