It appears that the hugely popular, highly addictive social networking site Twitter is, as they used to say on TV back in the day, "experiencing technical difficulties". The three-year old site, founded by Evan Williams and Biz Stone, is a micro-blogging site on which members answer the question "What are you doing" in "tweets" of 140 characters or less. Its runaway success is partly due to the many applications that make it possible for people to Tweet from cell phones, other websites, and multimedia venues. Many celebrities, public figures, and corporations use Twitter as a medium to reach their "followers", and as an effective marketing tool.
Twitter has even become an active participant in world affairs, as witness the use of the site to tell the world about the turbulence following Presidential elections in Iran last June. "Twitter addiction" has itself become so widespread, there's even an urban slang term for it: "twitterholic". Well, hurry back, Twitter! I need my fix.
UPDATE: The Twitter Status site confirms that Twitter is indeed down, and now Facebook is offline as well. Early reports suggest a distributed denial of service (dDOS) hacker attack as the likely cause. Stay tuned. I'm off to my Facebook/Twitterholics Anonymous emergency meeting...lol!
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