After a week in my new favorite city Chicago (move over Bangkok; check out pictures here and here, and videos here), I am playing that catch up game. My inbox is overflowing and the unread count on my Google Reader is making me question the darker side of RSS. One thing that didn’t change? Twitter. It is still down.

After endlessly defending Twitter to friends, and even giving Twitter kudos during their iPhone 2.0 related downtime, I am beginning to wonder if we shouldn’t be looking at other options.

The reason? No Instant Messenger tweeting. Even more frustrating than the intermittent inability to see who has replied to your tweets (the whole point, no?), the inability for me to submit tweets via IM is killing me. To top things off, my Facebook status/Twitter syncer of choice accesses the service via IM. I have no Facebook status!

I started tweeting via IM as to not add one more web2.0 obligation, but now the overhead of sharing trivial thought is less than trivial. Where does that leave me? Well, relentlessly checking the Twitter Status blog, which unfortunately seems to be as limited as Twitter’s 140 character tweets. It is a fate worse than… well, getting work done.

There is an interesting upside to the twitter-verse having some unexpected time on its hands. No, I am not talking about the temporary demise of Twitter-log Blog entries and repetitive stress thumb injuries. I am talking about a return to fan art! Right in the middle of an “I hate Twitter” fit, I ran across this:

Yes, this is a 3D creation of the twitter image I posted about a couple weeks ago. Apparertly the image was originally created by the Australian illustrator Yiying Lu. I had been pondering the meaning of the image, but Lu’s title of ‘Lifting up a Dreamer’ seems to suggest that Twitter is the whale, and that we are the tweeter struggling to lift it to greater heights. What do they dream about? An IPO? More servers? A t-shirt deal? Who knows, but it seems that even when it is down, people just can’t bring themselves to hate on Twitter.