Twitcott or Not?

I’m in Austin, and with the house empty today, I was just about to put my chicken scratch into readable format for a VIP client project.

I always like to scan the news (read: my blogging neighbors) before I settle down, to see if there’s anything that merits a comment, or your attention. And today I came across a post by my pal Paul Chaney, who is organizing a formal boycott of Twitter on the 4th of July. Kind of a declare your independence thing, very jazzy.

You can read more about what he’s calling the twitcott here, but be sure and read his more recent post about his rationale for boycotting Twitter – he’s saying hands off for a day, not for life.

I’ve made my share of comments on the issue, as you can see above. And I’ve had to resort to basically the same solution to resolve it.

Still, I haven’t decided whether to formally participate with boycott yet, as 1- I will probably be offline that whole day anyway, and 2- I’ve got questions about what happens if it’s successful.

1- Should the twitcott be successful, and Biz/Evan approach the Twitter community – what are our demands? Are we generally just looking to get better service?

2- Since so many of us are using it for business, are those of us who could afford a monthly/yearly donation or fee be willing to put our money where our mouths are in some organized fashion? Maybe for a dofollow link on a donor page?

I ask these questions because I’ve always thought the Twitter issue is a resource issue – not enough hardware to handle the bandwidth, or maybe the original code doesn’t scale well to this many simultaneous users.

In other words, maybe its popularity is its peril. If so, and we love Twitter so much, and our peeps are there, why shouldn’t we kick in a little bit? (Besides, of course, the two obvious reasons. 1- They haven’t asked us to and probably won’t, and 2- we probably wouldn’t get any kind of premium service out of it.)

There’s my two cents. I have to admire Paul’s resolve to do something, rather than just mope and scream like I’ve been doing. If you decide to twitcott tomorrow, but still blog, don’t forget to de-activate Twitterfeed or whatever you’re using to send your blog posts too.