Twitter outage may move some to try other platforms

The blogosphere has been a twitter the last few days about another service outage at Twitter, whose traffic seems to be growing faster than its infrastructure.

While TechCrunch said the huge uproar over the failure was proof of Twitter's market power -- and its users' addiction -- others raised the specter that it could be a Friendster-like turning point that opens the door to rivals.

Robert Scoble predicted it could benefit FriendFeed, which allows its users to easily share their content across the Web -- including their Twitter tweaks.

For more about FriendFeed, see this interview with co-founder Paul Buchheit. 

A more interesting angle is what all this says about the increasingly short attention spans of early tech adopters, whose loyalty to the latest social-networking platform has a half-life of about a month. 

Given that services like Twitter or Seesmic depend on the network effect for growth -- the more people use them, the more others want to use them -- what the tech pundits are recommending can impact what type of early-user growth curve they can achieve.

Ultimately, though, which platform becomes the defacto way to follow your friends around the Web will be determined by how easy they are to use -- and how often their network is available.

Full Disclosure: Buccheit is an investor in Vator.tv.