As you may or may not have noticed, Twitter.com disappeared for about an hour last night. Their DNS records were apparently compromised by someone claiming to be the (previously unheard-of) “Iranian Cyber Army”. The DNS entry, which essentially tells your web browser where to find individual sites, was apparently changed by some mischief makers to point to the wrong place. Some users saw a message from the “Army”, while others simply couldn’t access the site. It was back to normal in an hour or so.

It is unknown whether the “Army” acted in response to my repeated exclamations that “Twitter Must Die“.

It’s not the first time Twitter has gone down, though it’s certainly the most spectacular. Unfortunately, the crew at Mashable.com, who (as we’ve repeatedly noted, are obsessed with Twitter), reacted to the outage with Hindenburg-style hysterics.

Ben Parr, Mashable’s intrepid co-editor and repeatedly failed entrepreneur according to his own web site, breathlessly reported that Twitter had been hacked (a statement he later tweaked for accuracy purposes). Parr stated:

For one of the world’s most popular websites to be compromised and taken down, even for a few minutes, is a big problem. This type of thing should never happen, regardless of who is to blame.

You tell ‘em Ben! This should never happen! Twitter should never make the rookie mistakes you made with your own start-ups.

In his follow-up piece, Parr grew far more hysterical (and repeated the inaccurate, irresponsible “hacking” charge). Get a load of this:

We’re still in shock over what has just transpired. Twitter was just hacked.

…

Little compares to what has happened tonight. Even if it was a third-party DNS attack, Twitter still gets the black eye.

This is unacceptable for one of the world’s top 20 most-visited websites. There needs to be accountability for this situation (no matter if it’s within Twitter or within a third party), and a more detailed explanation is warranted. Twitter also needs to find a way to assure that this never happens again.

This is a tragedy beyond compare! It is unacceptable! Something must be done!

To their credit, some more intelligent Mashable readers called out Parr for over-reacting and being absurdly dramatic. But most of his readers joined right in:

Who knows if the hackers got our passwords and personal information?

I’m thinking about deleting my Twitter after this….It seems so unsafe now!

Do these people have all my info???

What will I do with out Twitter?

Can’t connect either from venezuela… There’s a hole in my heart and is killing me forever (8).. and is only being there for 30 min now =|,

I am having withdrawal symptoms already. Twitter down, not good :[

God Damn those fuckers, and Twitter has got to do something about the God Damn security on its website… damn it I am pissed off

PRAISE JESUS. TWITTER’S BACK.

Ben, you and your readers need to get outside and get some fresh air. You’ll feel better, I promise.

This time, courtesy of Mediapost.com’s Will Akerlof, who says it very nicely:

Twits: Why Twitter Won’t Change Marketing

Since January, they’ve also changed their tag-line from “All That’s New on the Web” to “The Social Media Guide”. Its a smart move, I’ll give them that; instead of a shotgun approach aimed at the entire web, they’re focusing on the niche that is currently getting the most attention. That’s one of the side benefits of having a name that means nothing: if they decided to cover cake recipes starting tomorrow, they could do it.

Another change seems to be including the advertising pitch right in their “About” page. Usually the general public doesn’t see its own demographic pitch, but Mashable puts it right there for the its readers to see:

Mashable will put your brand in front of the most tech-savvy early adopters, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, influencers, Web 2.0 aficionados and technology journalists. Mashable is also popular with bloggers and members of social networking sites — an increasingly influential demographic.

Wow – I’m impressed by how influential and tech-savvy I am, but I must say I feel a little dirty being used for my demographics.

Anyway, the purpose of today’s post is not to simply slag Mashable in any way possible (for example by posting links to hilariously bad early versions of their site, all of which pitch the latest “hot” web 2.0 startups that have since shriveled and died). No, today’s purpose is to simply point out how far off the deep end Mashable has gone into Twitter obsession.

At least in the early days, Pete Cashmore & Co. had the sense not to put all their eggs in one basket – they seemingly pitched any site that sent them a press release. But now it seems they’ve decided that Twitter is the future, period. Unfortunately, that makes it tough to run a web site, since there’s only so much to say about a service that sends tiny messages between users. So let’s take a look at the latest “social media news” according to Mashable:

Flirt140: Can You Find Your Dream Date Via Twitter?

Tweetmeme Shows Off the Future of Twitter Search

Tweet Street: 7 Extraordinary Twitter Uses in the Home

OneRiot Speeds Up Twitter Search and Adds Digg to the Mix

Scamming Twitter Trends: This Needs To Be Fixed

ThreadedTweets: Turn Your Twitter into a Realtime Conversation

TwitterJobSearch: Find a Job on Twitter

Literary Tweets: 100+ of the Best Authors on Twitter

The Retweeting Movement Adds Some Powerful New Tools

Please – anyone who gives a crap about about any of the above topics, write me and let me know why.

Of course, if Mashable is wrong, and Twitter is not the future of the internet and the next evolutionary step of mankind, they can always change their focus again. But as long as there’s an Archive.org, some of us will be here to throw it back in their faces. Sorry Pete, you deserve it for feeding into (and feeding from) the self-perpetuating “hotness” vortex of a phenomenon that is destined to end up here.

• Swine flu: Twitter’s power to misinform from foreignpolicy.com
   
• How False Rumors Can Cost Lives from canonical.org

And, because I can’t resist, a few (actual) recent Twitter updates. Names are unchanged, to expose the idiots. Is there really any difference from the cartoon above?

Realtime results for swine flu

2135 more results since you started searching. Refresh to see them.

• 
  NYKitten3483: i am so not taking my baby anywhere. this freaking swine flu! so not cool. a baby died from it. i am so not happy.
  less than 20 seconds ago from mobile web · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  GinBlossoms_Guy: Packing a bowl at the job-site with my new friend Miguel. How do I bring up swine flu without sounding too racial?
  3 minutes ago from Twittelator · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  Trevor_Latulas: I was really sick this morning. Hope I don’t have Swine flu. That would sux
  3 minutes ago from TwitterBerry · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  stphmli: swine flu is a conspiracy.
  6 minutes ago from web · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  nickicortese: Someone in the US died of swine flu! Holy Shit!!!!
  6 minutes ago from TwitterBerry · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  isnotanarab: Bin laden homies made swine flu…check the facts
  6 minutes ago from AndTweet · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  TTownTommy: Hmm the new movies coming in May may play 2 empty seats with the swine flu outbreak
  8 minutes ago from Tweetie · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  theimaginarykid: is not shaking anybodys hand and I’m about to start rockin mask and gloves like Mike Jackson. just heard swine flu hit the chi.
  10 minutes ago from UberTwitter · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  butterrs: so my roommate is sick, hope its not swine flu.
  15 minutes ago from TinyTwitter · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  brittanylovato: an entire family in Cibolo with swine flu. I am officially terrified. IT’S GONNA GET ME!!!
  17 minutes ago from web · Reply · View Tweet

That’s still a lot of people, no doubt. But it’s still a baby learning to crawl when compared to facebook, or even myspace. Hell, it’s not even as popular as friendster, which is apparently only still used by a few people in the Phillipines.

But wait, you say – Twitter has 14 million members! Well then why is daily traffic only about a million? Well, for a start: 1) lots of those “members” aren’t real people, and 2) the proliferation of bots, spam, fake “marketing” tweets and just plain boring “what I had for lunch” updates are driving away real people in droves.

Am I going to predict Twitter’s death? No, not just yet. It’s too early in the disease cycle. But this is one very sick baby. And ugly, too.

Fresh research from America confirms that online social networks are in fact playthings of the devil. Ohio profs say that use of Facebook leads to lower college grades, and others in California have found that Twitter gradually renders its users’ moral compasses untrustworthy.

First up comes Aryn Karpinski of Ohio State Uni, with the news that Facebook users (at least those in her survey) are lazy, self-deluding thickies.

“There’s a disconnect between students’ claim that Facebook use doesn’t impact their studies, and our finding showing they had lower grades and spent less time studying,” says Karpinski.

The PhD candidate collaborated with Adam Duberstein of Ohio Dominican Uni, surveying 219 students at Ohio State. These included 102 undergraduate students and 117 graduate students. Of the participants, 148 said they had a Facebook account. Some 85 percent of undergraduates were Facebook users, while only 52 percent of graduate students had accounts.

The Facebook users had grade point averages (GPAs) between 3.0 and 3.5 (in other words getting more Bs than As), while non-users averaged between 3.5 and 4.0 (more As than Bs)*.

Also, “students who spent more time working at paid jobs were less likely to use Facebook,” according to Ohio State.

“There may be other factors involved, such as personality traits, that link Facebook use and lower grades,” adds Karpinski, who doesn’t have a Facebook account herself.

“It may be that if it wasn’t for Facebook, some students would still find other ways to avoid studying, and would still get lower grades. But perhaps the lower GPAs could actually be because students are spending too much time socializing online.”

Meanwhile, neuroscientists at the University of Southern California (USC) have suggested that too much use “rapid-fire media” – specifically, Twitter – “may confuse your moral compass”.

“Lasting compassion in relationship to psychological suffering requires a level of persistent, emotional attention,” says Manuel Castells, holder of the Wallis Annenberg Chair of Communication Technology and Society at USC.

It seems that USC neuro-boffins hooked people up to brain monitoring gear and measured their responses to stories told in different ways about different subjects.

According to the USC statement:

The study raises questions about the emotional cost — particularly for the developing brain — of heavy reliance on a rapid stream of news snippets obtained through television, online feeds or social networks such as Twitter.

“If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states and that would have implications for your morality,” says Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, prof at USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute.

The USC researchers seem to suggest that learning things mainly through a constant stream of short, depersonalised info-nuggs will restrict a person’s ability to empathise with the people in the stories being told – to admire them, feel their pain or whatever.

Essentially, over-heavy Twitter use will make you cold, cynical and facile – ultimately leaving you heartless and dead inside.

“Indifference to the vision of human suffering gradually sets in,” says Castells.

There’s more from Ohio on Facebook making you thick/appealing primarily to lazy thickies here, and from California on Twitter making you dead inside/appealing primarily to the facile and amoral here.

Result: Like a “fun-sized” candy, life is made byte-sized, interaction relieved of character. Twitter is to conversation as porn is to making love.

OK, now it’s your turn.

[Inspired by Phil Baumann's Twitter Pitch in 140 Characters. Thanks Phil.]

It looks like the same people have set up accounts in about 30 major cities; @miamiescorts, @bostonescorts, etc. Altogether they have many hundreds if not thousands of followers. 

Presumably this has benefits not just in marketing, but also in recruiting new employees. Recruiting is vital in any business, and I hear prostitution has a lot of turnover. [Sorry, I couldn't resist that one.]

For the record, I think prostitution should be legalized, taxed and regulated. I’d say Health and Human Services was tailor-made to oversee it; just look at the name. And if we can have “sin taxes” on other things, why not on the big daddy of them all?

But for the moment it’s illegal, at least on paper. So, a Twitter account? One might think this would give law enforcement a “leg up” in finding this company (which doesn’t appear to be hiding anyway). But it seems they know the police care more about busting the hooker on the street than the pseudo-respectable “escort company”.

But how about the over 100 people following this account? Many of whom have apparently real names and faces on their accounts?

Hi Chris! Saw you on the internet!

Isn’t there a possibility that one might get in a little hot water with the wife/girlfriend/employer/potential employer/clients/friends/family for keeping up with the local hookers in such a public fashion?

And what about those being followed? As of now, this company is only following their other escort accounts. But unless I’m wrong, Twitter allows you to follow whoever you want. So don’t be surprised if you one day find yourself trying to explain why there’s a link to a prostitution service on your Twitter page.

If you do have that conversation, please let me know. I’d love to hear how it goes.

Nice grammar.

Previously I’ve written of my hatred for Twitter, including 15 Reasons Twitter Must Die, 1500 More Reasons Twitter Must Die, Twitter Fails Again, Twitter Officially Goes Mainstream, and Why is Mashable Obsessed with Twitter?. Not belabor the point (well perhaps), I’m afraid we need to revisit the issue. So let’s call this a series.

If your cell phone service occasionally went dead for an hour, would you be ranting all over the internet about how great it was? 

If the post office sometimes just didn’t deliver the mail for a day…OK, bad example.

How about if your cable or satellite TV went down during a big game like the Superbowl – even if you were watching something else? And next, during the World Series of Poker? And then during fairly-popular episodes of Oprah? Would you be excitedly proclaiming your provider’s greatness in your blog and encouraging others to use it?

As of today, Twitter worship continues, and yet this glorified Fisher-Price toy remains as unreliable as ever. This morning, TechCrunch reports on another Twitter outage, this time due to a “database problem“.

OK, fine. We all have our database problems now and then. My problem isn’t with the people at Twitter, though their Jack and Jill Magazine attitude toward their own failures must even get on their fans’ nerves sometimes:

No, my problem is with the slobbering fanboys and fangirls who are basing their monumentally pointless lives around it.

An exaggeration, you say? Let’s look again at Mashable, whose Twitter fandom remains unabated. On Monday, they posted the horrible “HOW TO: Live Inside Twitter and Still Stay Productive“  by Elliott Kosmicki, which recommends using Twitter to accomplish various important tasks. A few of his most ridiculous:

• Manage to do lists (“Next time you’re telling your followers what you ate for lunch, you can also make a note to call the cute waitress you met while you were there.” Yes, I’m sure she’ll be impressed when you tell her the story of how you twittered yourself a to-do note about her.)
• Set a timer (Be sure and use it for really important things, like “remember to feed the baby”. And what device are you using to access Twitter anyway? Does it not have a built-in clock?)
• Get your flight information (Are you really going to depend on Twitter to help you get to the airport on time? If so, you deserve to miss that plane.)
• Track your expenses (Sounds like a solid plan. I’m sure the security is top-notch.)
• Get news alerts (Because you can never have enough news alerts. Hey, have they found Caylee yet?)
• Track packages (“If you’re like me and spend too much time tracking your latest Amazon order…” No, thankfully, I am nothing like you.)

Elliott isn’t the only offender, of course. In fact he’s not even close to the worst. Take Darren Rowse of the execrable Problogger.net (How to make your blog stand out? “Pick a unique topic”). Darren smelled the money and started a Twitter-specific site, the atrociously-named Twitip.com. Are these people unaware of the meaning of the word “twit”, or is there some type of irony involved?

The titles of the posts tell an ugly tale of pointlessness: 

• How to Target and Attract High Quality Twitter Followers from Your Blogging Niche (because we don’t just want ordinary readers, we want “high-quality niche eyeballs”) 
• Would you say what you say on Twitter if it was a Real Life Face to Face Interaction? (What would you say if I suggested you had no social skills?) 
• Helping others leads to Twitter Success (which contains the odious terms “Twitterating” and “Twitternation”)
• Using your Blog to Promote Twitter, (“Twitterverse”, “Tweeple”)
• The Quest for 5000 – How many Followers are Enough
• And the question on all our minds, Does The Way You Twitter Cause You Stress?.

There are so many more examples of sites like this, but my brain hurts already. So in summation: if you find yourself acting anything like these people, please seek help. And please don’t tweet about it.

If you’ve read this blog before, you know I’m no fan of Twitter, the over-hyped tin can on a string of the 21st Century.

But I’ll admit it’s got its place. Yes, I’ve even got an account. I have a handful of friends who post the occasional useful or interesting update – although they would have been better served by emailing or blogging. Still, it is a rapidly-growing part of the current web landscape. As such, Twitter certainly deserves to be covered by a site specializing in the latest developments in social media.

But Mashable.com takes this to a ridiculous extreme. Mashable is one of the most successful blogs around, currently ranking number nine on Technorati’s top 100 blogs, The site’s tagline is “All That’s New on the Web”, and according to their “About” page: “[...] Mashable is the world’s largest blog focused exclusively on Web 2.0 and Social Networking news. With more than 5 million monthly pageviews, Mashable is the most prolific blog reviewing new Web sites and services, publishing breaking news on what’s new on the web.”

As a follower of such things, I duly subscribed to their feed several months ago, and have found a number of useful posts on various new media topics. But over time, I’ve noticed an increasingly specific focus. Take a look at these recent Mashable posts from the last week or so, and see if you can spot the trend:

Twitter Meltdown Not a Hack
How to Destroy Your Twitter Brand in Minutes
Twhirl Updates: Will You Dump TweetDeck?
How Should President Obama Use Twitter?
Do What Twitter Can’t: Cash In On Your Twitter Stream
Twitter API Gets Rate Limit; Will It Hurt App Growth?
40 of the Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them
Top FriendFeed Tips for Twitter Users
Another Presidential Transition: @TheWhiteHouse on Twitter
9 Ways Twitter Can Help in the Real World
European Companies Don’t Like Twitter. Should They?
HOW TO: Use Twitter on the Go

I’m expecting “How Twitter Can Achieve Middle East Peace and Make You a Sandwich” any minute now.

For every ten Twitter-related pieces, there is approximately one about Digg, one about Facebook, one about Google, etc.
 
So what explains the site’s transformation into “All Twitter All the Time“? Twitter is growing at an amazing rate (though it still only claims about 2-3% of the user base of Facebook). Perhaps founder Pete Cashmore and company see their own “monetization” strategy for Twitter, before the service itself has even made a dime?

To his credit, Cashmore did write a post called “Should Tech Blogs Shut Up About Twitter?” on January 11th, even including the self-deprecating Digg screenshot reproduced above. In the post Cashmore asked his readers: “should tech blogs, including this one, shut up about Twitter?”. The poll results sent a clear message:

Should Tech Bloggers Cover Twitter News More, Less or the Same Amount?
More 10% (115 votes)
Less 58% (661 votes)
Same Amount 32% (366 votes)

The commenters on this poll were after my own heart. For example:

“One can only get so much twitter news. its not too hard to figure out how to increase followers or do this or that. Its a 140 characters for crying out loud”
“Some team of people or single tweeter came up with a neat integration for the Twitter API… AWESOME! it happens 3 times a day.”
“How about a weekly twitter roundup if you must write about it?”
“YES PLEASE. Make it stop.”

Personally, I left Cashmore a comment commending him for noticing the oversaturation and being willing to listen to his audience.

However, in the two weeks since, Mashable’s Twitter noise has only gotten louder and increasingly irrelevant.

So what didn’t Cashmore and company understand about those results? Why ask your readers what they want if you’re going to ignore the results?

Two posts about a single Twitter user cancelling his account, complete with screenshots of his final updates? Come on, Pete. You’ve got a huge platform from which to speak. Don’t waste it.