Last night was a very sad night for micro blogging as its chief star Twitter was hijacked by Iranian government hackers who gained access to Twitter’s DNS servers and were able to temporarily redirect traffic elsewhere.
While it’s obvious that this was a pathetic attempt to silence those opposed to the Iranian theocracy (as Twitter has become a favorite venting place against the Mullahcracy), this latest attack may thwart Twitter’s attempt to become the “pulse of the planet.”
It was only 3 months ago that Twitter’s service was down–not from any fail whale sightings but rather from a massive DDOS from mother Russia!
These downtimes (whether from hardware failures or foes) do not help build confidence in its services (which makes it harder to convince my non-geek friends to sign up).
Twitter’s frenemy Facebook on the other hand has the appearance of Google (i.e. always working “rain or shine”), which might help explain why the social network continues to out pace my favorite micro blogging site.
With Facebook about to allow users to push their status updates to Twitter, we may see the blue and white juggernaut become the “pulse of the planet” as they attempt to leverage their 350 million plus users worldwide.
Although the recent attacks have signaled Twitter’s importance on the global stage (which is always a good thing in my book), staying online needs to be a priority as the last thing we need is for this micro blogging service to turn into an ex-geek fad (especially now that Oprah is on board).
Author: Darnell Clayton
Darnell Clayton is a geek who discovered blogging long before he heard of the word “blog” (he called them “web journals” then).
When he is not tweeting, friendfeeding, or blogging about space, he enjoys running, reading and describing himself in third person.
