@matt – You are correct about the connections being more valuable than the tool but how many valuable connections do you have on Twitter who you haven’t contacted outside of Twitter. If that avenue disappeared how easy would it be to reconnect?
These are the things I worry about.

But you’re right, it is about trust. For those businesses who rely a lot on twitter to build and form those relationships it’s a big deal. But you know what is a bigger deal, those relationships. Those relationships still exist weather twitter does or not. And those relationships will exist after twitter. If it’s a valued connection, then it’s bigger than the tool.

It’s been such a long time since Twitter really failed, we’d all gotten a little bit too comfortable – they just had to shake us a little bit.

As for the Twitter tshirt, they tried to pacify me with one of those too. My username was originally “thatcanadiangirl” (as Vero was taken) but they truncated it to “thatcanadiangir” without the L due to changes to the system (15 chars max). Thankfully, they also freed up Vero for me a few months down the line.

@astrid : I consider it a hate crime, cos I really hated it.

(And then it scares me when I think how it’s just a bunch of kids like us running these operations! =^) At least I got a t-shirt out of it.

Since today’s downtime was not a server problem, or through any fault (in theory) of Twitter’s own causing, it’s time for a different kind of fail whale: http://etherbrian.org/tweet/