Today my Twitter timeline stopped updating and as I write it hasn’t started again. It seems I’m not alone in this – there have been a lot of people complaining of a similar thing over the past eight or nine hours. This incident got me to thinking just how important Twitter has become to me as a web tool.

I was an early user of RSS and have been very keen on Google Reader for years. However, in the last six months my usage of Reader to keep up with events had virtually stopped. My “web radar” these days is definitely Twitter.

I used to worry that I was missing a lot by relying on Twitter. But on the occasions when I did devote the time to ploughing through my thousands of accumulated posts on Google Reader, I seldom found anything I found I didn’t already know about.

I must say I’m a bit surprised to find how central Twitter has become – I wasn’t really aware of it. The disappearance of my timeline today brought it home.