Cynic Root

I’m not that much of a Twitter user, but it seems that recently no blog is complete without saying something about twitter.
Twitter had a lot of downtime over 1-2Q08. It made all blogs talk about twitter even more, a lot more:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/20/twitter-something-is-technically-wrong/, http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/31/hey-twitter-i-have-a-few-questions-too/
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/23/201251
http://scobleizer.com/2008/05/15/twitter-down/
(Simply search “twitter AND down”. Actually, just search “twitter”).
It even makes me talk about twitter now.

So, the conspiracy theory: It is a publicity stunt, one for the books.
Twitter had a problem: the bloggers community used its services all the time, but nobody else knew about the service. Twitter wanted to raise money but couldn’t show enough growth (or a business model, if you believe the blogging about Twitter).
So Twitter did the craziest thing:
cripple the service,
get bloggers to realize how important it was for them and have them write about it,
get Blog reader to access twitter,
get investors to understand the value of Twitter.
Get the funding.

Evidence:
Twitter web access and search statistics went up the roof in 1-2Q08. Checkout: http://www.google.com/trends?q=twitter , http://trends.google.com/websites?q=twitter.com&geo=all&date=all , http://siteanalytics.compete.com/twitter.com/?metric=uv
Twitter’s downtimes made more people aware of it!
Add your own evidence as comments on this. There’s much evidence against this conspiracy, drop a comment about it too.

Well, I’m not the first to notice how the time contributed to Twitter, probably not the first one to propose this “conspiracy” and I’m not really saying that this was Twitter’s intention. But if it were, the people there should write a book about it.