When I fired up Tweetdeck to participate in #innochat tweet chat yesterday, I was greeted by silence. At first, I thought I was having local network issues, but after a quick check of the Twitter API status I realized that it was not me.

Twitter experienced a widespread service outage, actually two. Twitter was, down and out for more than ninety minutes. The outage was blamed on a “cascading bug” in one of it’s infrastructure components. This is reminiscent of the old days of Twitter when these outages were much more common, albeit I did not remember them lasting so long.

Immediately I wanted to broadcast the news of the outage….but how. Twitter was down and Facebook is too “closed” and news travels comparatively slowly. I wanted a near-real-time experience where I could jump on, see what was going on and what people where thinking and engage in conversation so I opened Google+. I hadn’t been paying much attention to Google+ because many of the people I want to connect with arent generally paying attention there. But today Google+ was on fire – at least among the circles that I had created when I was actively exploring it. I quickly tuned into a few conversations started by Jeremiah Owyang and another by Danny Sullivan.

Jeremiah provoked conversation with, “Google+ has never been down. Twitter is down and Facebook mobile is so slow”. And a comment in Danny’s thread basically said to give Twitter a break it is a free service. Woah a free service, not in my book. Twitter makes a lot of money because the users “pay” with their attention. It is a mutually beneficial relationship, an unspoken partnership with expectations by each party. Is it reasonable for the Twitter users to expect a reasonable level of service? Now I don’t think that today’s outage was a big deal, as these days outages such as this are infrequent, but look what it did, it pushed me, a die hard Twitter user, to spend time getting to know the competition.

What I found was that when people show up on Google+ to talk about a “happening” you get a much richer experience than either Twitter or Facebook. I think I will plan to spend more time in the future and hope that others do the same.