Twitter is dying. Summize and Twiddict are trying to keep it alive
Sad messages from Twitter.com.
Today is the day of Steve Jobs' Apple WWDC keynote. Very exciting! But it's a sad day for Twitter fans who are watching the service, already suffering from weeks of intermittent problems, collapse under the load of people who are tying to use it to talk about the Stevenote.
There are at least two initiatives for people, like me, who can't just walk away from our old friend: Summize and Twiddict.
Summize will tell you everything the Twittersphere is saying about Apple.
Summize is a Twitter search engine. It can read what's happening on Twitter and is a bit easier to deal with than the intermittent Twitter.com. Today, for the Stevenote, Twitter itself is publicizing a Summize feed that tracks Apple news (actually just the words WWDC, Apple, iPhone, and "Steve Jobs").
That doesn't help people who are having a hard time using Twitter to post to the service, or the API-based apps like Twhirl that are working worse than ever before. If you want to update Twitter during one of its outages, check out Twiddict, which will accept posts from you and queue them up until Twitter is working again. Clever, but it's clearly not a business. Furthermore, why bother updating Twitter when its recent and current outages are teaching its users--the people you're trying to reach when you post--to stay away from the site?
Twiddict lets you update Twitter even when it's down.
I've gotten some flack for my previous proposal that Twitter go offline until its scaling problems are fixed. But I stand by that idea: It's lunacy to keep a business open when you can't deliver on its brand promise. Especially, as in Twitter's case, if you're not making any money from it anyway.
Until Twitter is fixed, you can find me over on FriendFeed.
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe. 
Obviously this was written before the keynote...