Is the internet broken? And yeah, I’m finally on Twitter

Sometimes it seems like internet is just plain having a bad day. Today appears to have been one of those days.

After close to a year of encouragement from podcasters on both coasts, I’ve finally taken the dive into Twitter. So far so good. Except that less than twenty-four hours into it and Twitter has already taken a dump to the point that users are complaining left and right. Despite the outage, I’m not sorry at all that I chose now to dive in; wish I’d done so a lot sooner, and at this point better today while it’s up-and-down than let another week or month go by. I just wish it would stay up long enough for me to get a good feel for how it’s supposed to work. If you’re on Twitter and you want to follow along, my username is unsurprisingly “billpalmer” and if you have no idea what Twitter is, Chris Brogan does a nice job on how to get started and Joe C explains why he thinks it’s been so successful. I personally like the idea of being able to keep up with the friends in the industry I’ve made during my travels (or met online and may never even meet in person) without having to fill their days and mine with one-to-one email exchanges.

But back to the broken internet. It was during an iChat audio conversation with MyMac’s Guy Serle that I learned Skype had been down for the better part of the day. And it isn’t just the traditional internet channels that are acting funky today, either. The iPhone’s EDGE network has seemingly been a mess for the past twenty-four hours, which I found striking because I’ve generally had such good luck with it since I first got the iPhone.

By the time iProng’s Mike Strum hit me up with a terrible-looking video iChat tonight, I was ready to assume that iChat wasn’t working right either, until he pointed out that he was actually testing out a troublesome router.

In times like this I usually just figure that my own internet connection is off-kilter. But with Twitter and Skype being down for many users across the country, and EDGE also being out of whack, I can’t help but wonder if the entire internet has just been having a really bad day.

Or maybe so many people are excited to see my arrival on Twitter that they’ve overloaded the thing. KIDDING!