Twitter is a service where people send frequent, often meaningless, text messages to their followers. The service has suffered some bad news in the press recently.
First, some high-profile accounts, including Barack Obama’s, were recently hacked. Mike Arrington reports on his Techcrunch.com site:
…someone hacking into Twitter’s internal admin tools and compromising 33 high profile accounts, including President Elect Barack Obama, has Twitter users freaking out
about what to do.
Here is Twitter’s official explanation
“This morning we discovered 33 Twitter accounts had been “hacked” including prominent Twitter-ers like Rick Sanchez and Barack Obama (who has not been Twittering since becoming the president elect due to transition issues). We immediately locked down the accounts and investigated the issue. Rick, Barack, and others are now back in control of their accounts…”
Secondly, the service encountered outages during yesterday’s presidential inauguration. Ian Lamont at thestandard.com reports:
Twitter’s microblogging service experienced outages and delays on Inauguration Day, amidst a surge in tweets relating to the historic event.
Starting around 10 am, there were intermittent outages reported by users (see screenshot). For some, the site was not rendering or slow, while others were unable to post updates.
Even if Twitter did not suffer from these problems, the Low-Tech Times believes twittering is an unnecessary waste of time anyway.