Is Twitter the Tech Version of Britney Spears?

We all know that as Britney Spears continues to fall further and further down and it seems the further down she falls, the more people watch her, write about her and photograph her. In fact, the Fox news here in NYC (#1 market) said that should any news come about her move to the mental facility, they would break into the current show. I thought that was hilarious.

It seems like the same could be said for Twitter. The more it’s down, the more we get the birdie error message, the more we write about the company. Every post is basically the same from across the blogo, it’s either that Twitter doesn’t matter or Twitter is a huge force in communication today and they need to fix the issues immediately or be replaced.

Some of this week’s posts included:

• The Rise of Twitter as a Platform for Serious Discourse - Josh Catone notes, "Twitter is being used more and more for mainstream news coverage. With citizen journalism on the rise, it seems likely that Twitter will become an increasingly more important point for the distribution of breaking news during 2008, to the extent that traditional journalists will begin to pay more and more attention to it the way they have to blogs."
• Taking Twitter Seriously - Mark Evans notes, "At some point will Twitter become as ubiquitous as blogging?"
• Twitter moved hosting companies this week – frankly if I was running a hosting company, I wouldn’t want to host Twitter as it would reflect poorly on my company when they go down.
• Twitter integration the new shiznit - Robert Scoble loves the ability to send messages to his sheep about his Qik videos through Twitter. He notes, "Twitter has had a lot of uptime problems lately. If they are going to be used as infrastructure by more companies their reliability has to improve."
• If I Ran Twitter - a post by Ron Shevlin’s might actually be the Twitter post of the week. He suggests that Twitter should be asking “What are you thinking?” not "What are you doing?". He says this question change will lead to better discussion on Twitter.
• Dave Winer believes that Twitter should bring in some very active Twitterers to discuss the issues. Would be interesting to see who they would pick especially since the top tech bloggers aren’t using Twitter much. He compares this type of briefing to the President of the U.S. briefing Congress when there is an international crisis.
• And lastly, and this is the post of the week, Andrew Baron posts all of the different Twitter outage messages that we’ve seen over the year that the service has been "active". I hated the cat error message, which one was your favorite or most hated?

It’s almost as if tech bloggers can’t wait for the next f’up by Twitter. We all want to see the next error message. Any ideas as to why we are all so latched onto Twitter from a tech reporting perspective? It’s not a pageview driver, I can tell you that. It is a TechMeme driver though.