Twitter, the 140-character-or-less blogging service has problems lately. From last night till late this morning, I noticed the site was down.

PR people didn't really freak out, and according to our quick survey of agency people involved in web2.0 work, it didn't affect clients either. It is however, a great service for people with similar interests to quickly share a piece of real-time info with their disciples, err I mean "followers."

Edelman's Steve Rubel pointed to, and agreed with Dave Winer that people using Twitter have a vested interest in fixing it. Text100's Aaron Uhrmacher agreed that it's more of a personal annoyance and said downtime and interruptions are par for the course, akin to SecondLife.

Paull Young from Converseon pointed me to love notes from concerned tweeters here, here, and here, while Kevin Dugan suggested a bit of meme-mining at Twitterverse, Twitterbuzz, and Twitterstat.

Dugan's point is where this new communication gets interesting. By "new" we mean in the timeline of PR. We know Twitter has been around a while. Quick scans of what's hot on Twitter can tell you a lot about what's important to the early-adopters of not only tech but ideas. Tweeters want to be heard otherwise they wouldn't be there.

A bit of clarification about PRNewser. We aren't a web2.0 PR blog as many people assume. However, as we said yesterday, if people are using a new tool to engage each other and decide for themselves what is most important, we want to know about it. Eventually these things become the focus of entire PR conferences, or even the focus of new double secret corporate action groups. Btw, thanks for not getting back to us Blog Council.

If you require immediate...wait for the tired buzzword...ROI, check out these posts to learn how to use Twitter to find story ideas, find a PR job, and other case studies.

Feel free to chase Aaron, Paull, Kevin and Steve. They might Tweet something great that won't show up on their blogs.

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