Medication For Dave Winer and Others With Twitterdiction

I know what it’s like to be addicted. I was addicted to IRC in the mid-90s. It was a tough time – the bot wars, the ping floods, the no sleeping due to insecurity over potential nick loss, the network splits. It was tough. After a while, my friends came together and got me on some weekly injections and today I can say that I am no longer an addict. Ten days and counting.

Yesterday I posted some ideas on how to deal with the Twitter outage today. I received a variety of emails in my email client about how scared some were to live without their "fix" for 12 hours. I won’t post their names here as some are highly relevant folks in the Internet world and could have their reputations damaged. I just hope that we dont get to the point where we need a McRobertson Report to get the addicted people to stand up. Think about all of the people who lost a chance to be something because of those who pushed them aside because of Twitterdiction.

Some of my closest Internet buddies seem to be infected or on the verge of infection with Twitterdiction. Jeremiah Owyang has a pretty bad case of it, at least he gets paid to sit on Twitter. Jason Calacanis has a mild case of it – how do I know? Simple, when it’s down he gets the shakes because he has no way to get his dog photos to his sheep. Robert Scoble had the disease but I got him the meds and he is off it now which is great news that there is a cure! Marshall Kirkpatrick is close to the edge – even suggesting that Twitter pays his rent. I can’t even get Twitter to find me a date!

Yet these cases of Twitterdiction fall short compared to the entry from Dave Winer this morning. I have never met Dave though I would really like to as he seems like a smart, swell guy. We had a blast on the IRC channel during TC40 – he made the presentations fun. I enjoy reading his entries. But I think he forgot to take his meds today.

Some notes from his entry:

• What other basic form of communication goes down for 12 hours at a time?
• What if the web went offline for 12 hours at a time?
• Same with the phone network. Imagine if all the cell phones and land lines went down for scheduled maintenence for 12 hours. Again, it’s unthinkable.

In the comments Rachel Clarke suggests that more people outside the U.S. are using Twitter than inside the U.S. Side note, I had coffee with Rachel yesterday – she’s very bright and she might be developing a mild case of Twitterdiction but nowhere as bad as any of the other mentioned individuals.

So back to Dave. Is he really comparing Twitter to the Web in general? Or to phone service? All I can do is LOL. Twitter is ONLY a layer of communication. If it goes down, you just revert to the other 1,509,020 methods of communication. The unfortunate thing is that Dave is also speaking for many others who also suffer from this disease. Don’t worry Dave, by tomorrow Twitter will be back! (actually it hasn’t gone down yet from what I can tell)

Dave, send me your address. I’d be happy to help you out during the medication period to help you get over your Twitterdiction.

And to anyone wondering, I am working up a mega batch of the medication which I will bring to SXSW this year as I am sure we will need to get it out in large doses.