Keller @ Large: How Do People Survive Without Twitter?
BOSTON (CBS) - It doesn't seem to have quite risen to the level of the great Northeast blackout of 1965, or the Blizzard of '78, but yesterday's loss of Twitter service for up to several hours was apparently a traumatic event for some overly-enthusiastic users.
Listen to Jon's commentary:
Podcast
During the outage, which hit some tweeters off and on early yesterday afternoon, a number of them posted e-mails saying, essentially, my life is over.
Gee, folks, take that as a warning sign that you were due for some serious re-examination of your quality of life.
But I have no right to talk, I was one of the lucky millions who suffered no outage.
And in order to assess just how lucky I was, I went back and catalogued some of the priceless information that oozed onto my Twitter feed during that time.
I learned that congressional candidate Joe Kennedy's interns stayed cool in the heat by posing for a twitpic holding Joe Kennedy signs, and wearing khakis, and that according to the latest polling, President Obama's standing is being hurt by - get this - bad economic news.
I learned more than I wanted to about David Ortiz's locker-room rant against news outlets which, by their almost uniformly adoring coverage of him over the years, have helped make him a multi-millionaire.
I learned that "a homemade ice cream cookie sandwich is the perfect, well-portioned summer treat," and was offered a link to a New York Observer article about "the Hipster Hamptons," which I declined to click on.
But it wasn't all bad news.
From Twitter, I received a link to the Top 5 Summer Movies to Watch with Your Dog. I'll give you a hint: "101 Dalmatians" finished third.
I was informed that the state has issued a call for artists to paint park donation receptacles. Proposed payment for their time: zero.
Did you know that the average kidney is the size of a fist?
I do now.
And Albert Brooks tweeted: "I might be crazy but I'm positive I saw Mubarak at the mall today."
Yes, Twitter is a mixed-blessing at best.
A substitute for real life, it's not.
An invitation to be bored, it can be.
However, I do expect to win quite a few bar bets off that list of top 5 dog movies.
You can listen to Keller At Large on WBZ News Radio every weekday at 7:55 a.m. and 12:25 p.m. You can also watch Jon on WBZ-TV News.
