Jonesin' For Twitter

Something remarkable happened the last time the power went out. My family and I grabbed a seat on the porch and we actually talked to each other. It was scary at first. No blue glow on our faces, nothing provided via electronic transmission for us to comment on. Of course, all that retro-interaction ceased abruptly as soon as the youngest of us heard the AC kick on again.

There were butts just waiting to be kicked inside the magic Wii machine.

People get hooked pretty easily on things. That's why I try, when possible, to stay far away from the computer on the weekends. It's hard sometimes. Sometimes I envision my email just sitting inside the machine piling up, something important, something funny, something interesting, something to be deleted. Must. Go. Look…

It was because I was avoiding my electric opium all weekend that I missed the crisis: The Twitter Crisis. Twitterers weren't getting their tweets.

For the whole weekend.

This spurred TechCrunch's developing scripts to get around the outage—reminded Arrington of people "stockpiling candles and bottled water for the next big storm."

"We have people calling on a weekly if not daily basis," says Libby Smith, a corporate clinician for the Illinois Institute for Addiction Recovery, which helps treat internet addicts. "If somebody engages in the use of an application compulsively, we get calls about it. There isn't one application that's good or bad, but if people are unable or unwilling to stop using it, that's what we look at as a red flag for an intervention."

I sense a cable reality show on the horizon…Hopefully I'll be on the porch waving at cars as they pass—just like my grandfather—when it airs.