Twitter down, Facebook funky, where's your ego-massaging messiah now?

Millions of people awoke today to find they couldn't tweet about their poops or post-party shenanigans. As the web cried a collective "oh noes," the alternatives started hiccuping as well. Yep, Facebook began having fits and spurts as it felt the collective sag of all those un-tweeting masses rush to the "next best thing."

So what? Well, I'm sure it'll all work itself out somehow. But centralized, walled systems (Facebook, I'm looking at your wall there) are bound to outage whereas distributed, open systems are less likely to suffer a similar fate. As usual, Dave Winer was right. (Note: Dave's not always right, but here I agree with him)

As TechCrunch points out, these things happen. Even the mothership at AOL suffered a massive AIM outage the day Michael Jackson died, and the NOC in Virginia is one serious monster of a server farm. But it's interesting to see the ebb and flow of the social masses as they move from one felled site to another, sometimes breaking branches as they go. Looks like Bebo and MySpace are unaffected. Ahem.

Update: Uh oh, did Kim Jong Il get upset about not being a trending topic? Ev says Twitter was and is fending off a denial-of-service attack.

Tags: downage, facebook, failwhale, network, twitter