Oh whoa is all of us when Twitter goes down for the last time. When the spermy whale fails eternal. When the birds of a feather can no longer flock together. When Tweetdeck implodes.

How long do you think it will take GOOGLE to completely replace the functionality of Twitter? I’m talking soup-to-nuts. APIs, database, server loading, failure recovery, account settings, preferences. Say they put 100 scientists and coders on the task. Or 1,000. Would Biz and EV have a prayer or a revenue model to stand on after a few months?

I can hear you saying, "But Google tried with Jaiku." And I nod in agreement with your sentiment, but not with the statement. Google doesn’t TRY much. Google either OWNS or it PAYS ATTENTION SOMEWHERE ELSE.

So have you seen the WAVE stuff? Let’s see: email, IM, threaded discussions, news, search, facebook-ish stuff, profiles… and if Google doesn’t OWN it guess what, they’ll add a little chiclet, a losenge, an iGoogle widget-like-thingy to RUN ANY APP YOU LIKE. And you might Google TWAVE (heck it might be more fun if you BING it.) if you are wondering what WAVE’s Twitter-sipper app will be.

But let’s say, Twitter does experience a major fail, say for more than their typical hour or two of annoying whales, service outages, maintenance updates, what-have-yous. Let’s say Twitter goes DOWN (TwitterIsDown.com) for say… three days. Three whole days, you pick the timezone. 72 hours of tweetfree living. Would that piss you off enough to join FriendFeed? And if you answered NO to that question, what would piss you off enough to begin looking for a service provider that could handle your requests. A service provider that didn’t have cultish rules and limits and seemingly pointed and personal "twitterjail" attacks.

So TWITTER IS STILL DOWN, is the big news story on the cover of the Tuesday NY Times. And by Thurday, when the CIRCUITS section is published, even David Pogue is mad! "The end is near my friends. I can’t post my TwitPic or my TwitStock or my NitTwit. I can’t get my social media game on without Twitter."

What then…

Here are what some are saying about just that. Let’s listen in, and I’ll be back with a wrap in a few minutes.

Twitter: Will It Implode Under the Weight of Its Hype? By Derek Harding, ClickZ, Jun 11, 2021

For some months now, I’ve been pondering the question of Twitter. Clearly it’s the most hyped social network of the moment.

Industry thought leaders, especially those in the e-mail arena, keep talking about it being a game changer. Leaders have even answered complex questions about reaching markets with the single word "Twitter." Then to cap it all off, "Time" magazine this month has a major piece about how Twitter is going to change everything, including business and marketing.

But I still don’t get it.

I’m not talking about the question of Twitter’s business model and whether it can find a solid revenue stream and build a profitable business. This is a significant concern. It isn’t clear that Twitter has a plan or a likely path to revenue.

and this from Mashable:

The Twitpocalypse Is Coming! Is Twitterland Doomed?!?, June 10th, 2009 | by Ben Parr

When Twitter goes down unexpectedly, the Twitterverse has often gone nuts with confusion and anger. It was only last year when Twitter Twitter reviews’s stability issues turned the fail whale into a running downtime joke. Even as recently as this January, Twitter couldn’t handle the keynote at MacWorld. And now, Twitter is magnitudes bigger, so what would happen if it went down in dramatic fashion?

Well, if you believe Twitpocalypse, we’re going to see something catastrophic on June 13th. In fact, this page, which has been making the social media rounds, predicts that Twitter will be ravaged with disaster at 5:05 AM ET (10:05 AM GMT). Specifically, it predicts third-party Twitter apps will crash, creating chaos across the Web. Could this really happen? And on what basis does this website predict a Twitpocalypse anyway?

But wait there’s more… you can Bing/Google/Yahoo it on your own. Perhaps you catch my WAVE or my drift or my TWEET-OF-DEATH around Juneteenth. Wait a sec. It’s JUNETEENTH when Twitter’s gonna fail. Is that Ironic or Funny? I forget which is which.

@jmacofearth

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