Twitter of a death foretold, anyone?

And so the latest tool for howling in the internet wilderness, Twitter, was down almost all day. Can you imagine all the pent-up twitters that must be bombarding the system right now?

Twitter's nice for those stray bits that don't really merit their own post or, at least, can be said in 140 characters or less, although I think its real purpose is to serve as a kind of real-time and more-or-less mobile message board. I'm not likely to be using it out of the web, though, because it's a bit odd, don't you think, to be informing so many people of what you're doing (besides twittering about it) at the exact time you're doing it? "Informing" is the operative term here because, unless explicitly demanded, no action need be taken by the informees.

I'm currently using it as a kind of sideblog. (I wonder where all the proper sideblog services went. The ones I had disappeared long ago, along with the ephemera.) At first, I wanted more than one twitter to show and found some code for that--there's a too-cute but not very customizable one over at Widgetbox--but, on second thought, one twitter's enough twittering.

What I'm thinking now is if this is where blogging might be headed. I mean, lots of blogs (and anti-blagues) are really just lengthy twitterings, anyway. We would be doing everyone a favor by being the soul of wit and keeping our existentialist musings down to soundbite length. If we're lucky, this might be the dawn of a new literary form: the epistolary twitter.

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I just remembered a phoneblogging service offered by Pinoy Exchange in late 2001. A friend of mine signed up for the service and would post things like running to the premiere screening of Lord of the Rings and how he felt dizzy during the train ride. Stuff like that. And I told him that it's just like sending SMS but without expecting a reply. Or SMS-ing yourself. (Why?) But the service was bland with no networking capability to speak of. (This was pre-FOAF apps.) Needless to say, the service didn't really take off and it's gone now.

[Crosspost]