The downtime this morning was nearly unbearable to geeks grown dependent on Twitter for work, regular social connection or a sense of meaning in life. Fortunately the service appears to have been back up for some time now. (Update: It looks like it's back down again!) It was honestly causing substantial problems here at ReadWriteWeb, in terms of our research, writing and promotion. When your workday goes from full of streaming links and pop-up notifications to having far less of those, it can feel awfully lonely.

It is unclear whether competitors like Google Buzz or Facebook draw strength from Twitter's occasional falters, but advocates of distributed social networking protocols as a substitute for a single, corporate-controlled point of failure certainly do.

Photo: Fake Bird Twitters at Real People, from NYCTheBlog