I have had a Twitter account for over a year, but I never found a compelling use of it until today. I tried several times to use it as a microblogging site, but I found the 140 character limit to be too restrictive, and the reply feature is very lacking. For blogs, I either use blogstalk or wordpress.

What happened earlier today was a failure of some websites that I own. They didn’t load properly and the hosting company’s website also didn’t load, so I couldn’t contact technical support or get a status update. Theplanet had a router failure in Texas and my hosting company gets it’s internet from them. I first tried Google News, but they are too slow. They take at least two to three hours before reporting anything. I also tried Slashdot, because it’s a technical thing, but they also have delays due to the approval process.

Twitter was the only site that had any information about the outage. Within five minutes, there were Tweets from other site owners who had outages. Most notably, there were tweets from my hosting company. I won’t rely on Twitter as my primary news source, but I will use it again to check on recent events that I don’t see reported in the news found at other venues.