Twitter Grows, and Crashes

techPresident reports on recent Twitter crashes:

First Macworld, now the State of the Union. Several times during tonight’s SOTU address Twitter’s servers were overloaded, preventing users of the popular micro-blogging service from sending or receiving tweets for several minutes at a time.

A scan of Twitter’s public timeline during the speech showed a number of tweets about Bush’s (hopefully) last address to Congress. Personally, I got a flurry of tweets commenting on the speech from the people I follow on Twitter.

I’ve noticed this, too. Both the slowdown, this morning, for example, when the news came that John Edwards dropped out of the race, as well as the increasing number of people I follow talking about events as they happen: Heath Ledger’s death, the SOTU (all not-so-favorable of Bush…), the Tom Cruise video.

For some reason, perhaps that it’s much “lighter” than other apps, when Twitter crashes, it’s not all that bad. It’s just an annoyance, at least for now.

But the larger point is, Twitter seems to be growing; it’s increasingly a place where people go to talk about what’s happening around them.