Can we get these twits to stop twittering?

I don't know whether Jupiter's out of whack with Mars, but suddenly there's a nasty undercurrent in the tech firmament.

Over the weekend, the geekerati had a cyber-conniption over the way BusinessWeek's Sarah Lacy questioned Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg at the South by Southwest Conference. (Well, at least she didn't try to ask, "Boxers or briefs?" but whatever. It's time to move on, guys.)

Matt Mullenweg: Don't mess with me, sucka

(Credit: Automattic)

Anyway, today's fit du jour concerns a mudslinging bout between Anil Dash of Six Apart and Matt Mullenweg of WordPress. They haven't reached the pistols-at-30-paces stage yet. Then again, the day's not done.

What ignited their dispute? A blog post by Dash in which he seeks to woo away WordPress users. "As you might know, WordPress 2.5 is about to be released, and we wanted to encourage WordPress users to upgrade. To Movable Type."

That set Mullenweg to twitter that Six Apart is "getting desperate and dirty." Dash responded with a tweet that Mullenweg was resorting to "name-calling and slander instead of substance." (If this keeps up much longer, they both risk sounding like twits, not tweets.)

Anil Dash: Go ahead. Make my day

(Credit: Six Apart)

The dueling posts stirred passions in some corners of the blogosphere, but this is relatively tame stuff. Fact is their snit pales in comparison with the brickbats hurled between Microsoft and IBM during the height of the operating-systems rivalry during the early 1990s. Ditto for the incessant badmouthing between Microsoft (them again?) and Netscape during the so-called browser wars later that decade. And of course there's Larry Ellison, the master of disaster when it comes to trash talking everybody in the enterprise apps universe.

I don't have a dog in this fight, though I do have a soft spot for Mullenweg as a (very successful) CNET alum. But this is soooo inside baseball. Maybe it's time to get a thicker skin, move past the personal stuff, and just let the market decide who's got the better blogging platform.