Seems to me that Twitter is, in fact, a very important issue with far too much discussion about downtime and not enough about why Twitter appears to be replacing blogging, Facebook, and email as the communications paradigm of choice for the digital elites, which often means  the rest of the online world will soon follow.

Twitter’s system failures have become so common that several of the silicon folks like Mike Arrington are suggesting that people should be moving  to other services – most noted is FriendFeed which now allows “room” conversations as a way to sort noise from signal and talk with a group about specific topics.   I think if they’d come along at same time FriendFeed would be winning the war for the hearts and minds of the legions of twitterers, but Twitter has such a foothold as the microblogging / communication tool of choice it’ll be hard to unseat Twitter unless their services fail to improve over the coming months.   Improvement is likely given their recent Venture capital injection which effectively valued Twitter at about 100 million – enough that money will  soon pour in as needed to beef up their shaky infrastructure.

Why is Twitter important?   It’s really a form of A.D.D. blogging – fast and furious with links out to full treatments which can be read only if they really look interesting.  Because Twitter caters to short attention spans and also throws everybody in regardless of laptop color or digital creed, it’s going to keep catching on fast with the business and tech crowd.   I am NOT convinced it’ll be a big hit for grandma or even Nascar dads, who will see Twitter for the time waster it tends to be…

Yikes.. my Twitter Deficit Disorder makes me think a blog post of more than 143 letters won’t generally get read anyway, and makes it harder to write.