Why don't people mind when Twitter is down?

I think people *DO* mind. It's just that they find Twitter so valuable/so much fun that they keep coming back despite the outages.

Let's hope not. An Internet filled with barely operative services is what would most likely result if users stopped demanding quality, and slacking became an easy choice for technicians to make.

Maybe the user mellowness follows because of what Twitter is for? If one posts an article to Blogger and somebody reads it two years later, there may be a point to him doing so. Blog posts, like webpages, become a kind of reference material, and for a reference to do it's there for, it has to be available as needed, for those looking for it.

If Twitter goes down, though, what happens? Twitter is not really reading material. Twitter is just a way of telling one's friends and stalkers where they can go to find one. If it goes down, one's friends just text message one, or maybe check Pownce, and one doesn't end up with these frustrated readers who were expecting to see content, and maybe a few webmasters who one then has to ask to please not delete their links to one's material.

With places like Blogger and Wordpress, one is hoping that others online will find one's place, so if service really starts to reek and one has to relocate, one has a devil of a time trying to recover the visibility one has lost. With Twitter, the people one is hoping will see one's little place are one's friends, people one knows IRL, so one just passes around a few slips of paper. At a serious blogging host, one would have the time consuming job of moving all of that material, but if one decides to move off of Twitter, one leaves it behind, because how pressing a need does one feel to have the world know that one was out at Kopi at 3:45 pm on August 12, 2003? There's no real continuing line of discussion to preserve in coherent form.

I'm guessing that's it, but I hardly ever bother to use Twitter at all, so take this for what it's worth. The shameless self-promotion seen in the insertion of the links I placed in this post comes free of charge. :)