Twitter outage creates panic

According to CNN, the twitter outage left users feeling as if they had lost a limb or left home without their cell phone. It is suggested Twitter needs competition to provide alternatives when an outage occurs, as they inevitably will. There were (or are?) a couple of alternative social microblog services available (is jaiku still running?). Of course, this won't help if multiple sites get attacked at once.

What would help is Google Wave. This outage is an incredible opportunity to demonstrate the potential for resiliency a "federated" or distributed social media system has. Content in the Google Wave universe is independent. Every user can have a copy of a bundle of posts, comments, content on their own device. Multiple copies can exist on different servers. It could be possible for a group to continue working, or at least work offline with their content, during an outage and then when connection is reestablished, the changes can be merged back into the conversation. This is what we can do with email now. We can read messages in our inbox (as long as it is not webmail) even when the network is unavailable. We can keep messages around as long as we want. We can write draft replies, take notes, resuse content through quoting or editing the text we recieve and at any time later, forward to others or send the revisions back to the sender.

What did I do during the panic? I just waited for Twitter to come back up. I only post once a day (if I am feeling up to it).