Here we go again...
....with Twitter.
No, they're not down. No 'fail whale'. This time it's worse.
Apparently, those with over 2000 followers can't access their accounts. As of this post, there's been no explanation on the Twitter blog (other than 'a work in progress' on spam filtering?). The customer service which finally appeared on Twitter (after numerous complaints) is nowhere to be found.
This has been a 'known issue' on Pownce for some time but they've addressed it publicly numerous times.
Good enough for me.
So what does all of this have to do with the title of this post?
In the past month, numerous web 'personalities', SEO people, and some of the original 'Social Networkers' (I really dislike that term) have all been posting directly to Friendfeed.
Veronica Belmont, Sarah Austin, Tamar Weinberg, Ann Smarty, Lora Lufark, Shana Albert, Matt McGee,
Kimberly Bock and many others, well known across various (and diverse) Internet marketing circles, are now using Friendfeed.
So now, Twitter pulls the plug on mega-bloggers?
This is either crazy, or they should have explained why .... IN ADVANCE.
The 'I told you so' came from Robert Scoble and he's right.
Twitter just shot it's No. 1 advantage and the reason people were willing to deal with the many outages. Most had spent a lot of time and energy building communities of friends there.
Where will they go? Identi.ca and Friendfeed.
I, for one, welcome everybody, including those that just joined the 'blog world' yesterday.
My guess is Friendfeed and Identi.ca will handle it just fine.
It'll be more interesting, informative, and just more fun!
Update 10:30 PM ET: First, the post on what is going on at Twitter is here. Apparently, it's not 'cut in stone' and some (including Robert, as of a few minutes ago) are 'getting a pass'. My own take, for what it's worth, is that 'fine-tuning live' is really bad (and outright not fair to many others?!). There had to be a better way. Twitter needs capacity, not censorship.