Monday, August 10, 2009

Story of the Year: Twitter Silenced

It turns out that the fantastic Twitter outages might be the result of a slap-fight between a bunch of Russians and Georgians (as in the non-college-football-obsessed kind of Georgians, the ones who live in Europe). Or, more specifically, an attempt by some Russians to silence one Georgian in particular--one guy! A bunch of hackers (apparently) brought down Twitter, Facebook and a few other sites in order to get one guy off the Web. Could Ray Bradbury or George Orwell have seen this coming? Oh, I don't think so. By the way, Twitter is down right now as I type on late Sunday night-early Monday morning.

Now, THIS is Web 2.0...or something. Maybe it's Web 0.0 for the poor guy in Georgia (who really does seem like an unfortunate victim here--although he might be suffering for the greater good in this case). Whatever it is, I am enjoying this whole thing far more than I should. Health care? Beer diplomacy? Michael Jackson? The economy? Bailouts and stimulus packages? Nah, forget all of those things. This is the story of the year. The Russian bear is growling, and it's drowning out the sounds of all those Tweets. How wrong would it be for me to cheer for the bear?

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