Maintain Radio Silence

After staying up writing most of the night, I slept through the big event on the Internet this morning...Twitter was down for more than an hour...the longest outage since November 2011.

Lots of Twitter users were freaking out because many were waiting for the Supreme Court rulings to come out. The two most anticipated rulings in several years, ObamaCare and Arizona's Immigration Law didn't debut Thursday after all.

The Twittershpere has been all wound up anyway, due to the Fast & Furious hearings in Congress, so equal parts of Snark, Seriousness, and Conspiracy Theory were on display...something for everyone...

I realized in the aftermath, just how much I've come to rely on Twitter for Real Time News. It's way faster than my beloved radio, even...

Fail Whale, MIA

Missing in action this time around, the Twitter "Fail Whale" was nowhere to be seen during the outage.

In the days before the crash, I found a few more History Tweeters, and made a mental note to share them here.

I find it curious that we are in the midst of the 200th Anniversary of the War of 1812, our second victory over the British, and yet if it weren't for Twitter, I wouldn't have known of it because of the omission of it by the Mainstream News Media.

Thanks to @warof1812online, I'm privy to an ongoing stream of history tidbits from 200 years ago. Another cool thing about this tweeter is they've alerted me to several other History Tweeters by retweeting them, so they show up in my Twitter Timeline.

One of these new-to-me accounts is really a gem. @navalhistorian has been tweeting details of The Battle of the Philippine Sea the past few days, including the story of "The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot" from 70 years ago.

Twitter being a Social Network is all about connections...think branches on a tree, and these seem to multiply if you're curious. With every new account that you follow, oftentimes they will lead you to other accounts with a similar outlook or interest, and then you can follow them too.

My new history "follows" are stacking up:

@SpitfireMuseum 
devoted to the famous British Spitfire and Hurricane fighter planes
@NavyHistoryNews
The Naval History and Heritage Command is the official history program of the United States Navy
@sommecourt
 Military Historian & author who works in Television: visiting & interpreting battlefields all over the world. Working on a big World War One archaeology dig in Flanders.
@MayHillWWII
May Hill began to keep a Diary, and write poetry, not long after the outbreak of the Second World War. Son in the RAF: 'Waiting for news'

So  today is "Follow Friday" on Twitter. This is a convention that organically started on Twitter where many tweeters tweet  a list of accounts to follow, fronted by the hashtag: #FF

Hashtags make searching Twitter easy, and I play #FF most Fridays. I tweet my list of History Tweeters, Astronomy and Spaceflight Tweeters, San Francisco Giants Accounts, Sierra Weather Accounts and Skiing Tweeters.

Because I keep finding new History Tweeters, it's going to take more than one History #FF from here on out, and I'll probably need a fourth Giants #FF tweet...talk about Happy Warriors...