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Twitpocalypse Now? Hardly.

By Christopher Saunders on June 15, 2009 9:50 AM

You can come out of your bomb shelter now -- the Twitpocalypse didn't happen! Mostly.

What am I talking about? My colleague Sean Michael Kerner maps out the glitch-that-mostly-wasn't that had been widely feared (well, "widely" among the kinds of folks who live and die by the microblogging phenom,) but for the layman, think Y2K for Twitter.

(You can also get the gist of the technical discussion here.)

The real story, however, is how widespread the hysteria reached. But I suppose these kinds of mass online panics aren't anything new in the Web 2.0 era -- nor will this be the end of it.

For the most part, the damage is limited to Twitter application vendors needing to update their wares. That's a good thing: We don't have to suffer millions of devout Twitter users -- or however many devout users the service actually has -- wailing about their loss. (Then again, if Twitter really did go down during the Twitpocalypse, where would those devotees do their wailing? Hmm.)

Of course, this all means that everyone who had been tweeting ad nauseum about the coming of the Twitpocalypse now means that they'll be tweeting ad nauseum about how everything is basically fine, and that their particular Twittering app or service of choice has been or hasn't been updated. (Don't believe me? Check out #twitpocalypse.)

So, yes, Monday morning has rolled around, and the Twitter prattle-verse is alive and well.

As for the rest of us, having escaped the Twitpocalypse unscathed means only one thing: More time to ruminate at length on how Facebook has jumped the shark. Sigh.

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