I’ve been receiving emails from people asking “what happened to your Twitterfast”? The posts that you’re seeing from me in Twitter are automated posts from Friendfeed which keeps an eye on my blogs, delicious bookmarks, Facebook posts, Flickr uploads, etc. I haven’t posted directly to Twitter (except asking for help on uStream last night) for 36 hours and it has been HARD. I have the impulse to post to or check Twitter every few minutes. Just nonsense stuff really… about thoughts I’m having, people I’m talking to, where to catch a bus, plugging sites I’ve discovered, etc. Nothing terribly important or special but it does really make me notice how much I rely on Twitter every day. As I was discussing with some folks in a meeting today, Twitter is really my primary search engine for so many things. I’m finding living without it pretty difficult.

Back in 2001, I gave a series of CIO breakfasts for Microsoft. One of the things I talked about was a rating system I had for evaluating new technologies and services in my life. It went something like this:

Rating 1: If it disappeared tomorrow, I would hardly notice.
Rating 2: If it disappeared tomorrow, I would notice but could happily live without it.
Rating 3: If it disappeared tomorrow, I would feel the absence but would cope.
Rating 4: If it disappeared tomorrow, I would feel the absence and proactively look for a replacement.
Rating 5: If it disappeared tomorrow, I would go to war to get it back.

Where is Twitter for me right now? Somewhere between 4 and 5 I think.