babbling blue

I reluctantly admit it, Twitter is good for something. I was having gmail problems and wanted to find out if it was localized or if gmail was–as it appeared–down. I searched “gmail is down” (in google, of course) and the top result said “Is gmail down? Ask Twitter!”

Huh…well yeah I guess that’s good advice, thought I. So I went to Twitter.com only to be told that Twitter was busy, as there were too many tweets! Uh oh! Internet meltdown! But I hit refresh about 30 seconds later and I was able to search for “gmail”. I was greeted with a great many tweets indicating that gmail was down. Shortly thereafter a nifty Web 2.0-y notice appeared on the page telling me that there were 633 new results matching my query since I searched…and this was in less than a minute. That’s pretty impressive.

So yeah, gmail is down. And Twitter–a site I don’t really give a damn about–is good for telling me that gmail–a site I’m glued to all day–is down. Thanks for the tweets!