Twitabit Saves Your Tweets if Twitter’s Offline

It's the middle of the night, and you have a burning post to make on Twitter, but it's down--again. Twitter has gotten something of a bad reputation for being down lately, a fact that's made many Twitter fans investigate other micro-blogging services like Pownce or Plurk. However, if Twitter is down and you absolutely have to get that post up as soon as Twitter comes back online, Twitabit can help. The service hangs on to your Tweets and posts them as soon as Twitter comes back online.

Twitabit is pretty simple; give the service your Twitter username and password, and what you'd like posted to Twitter when the service comes back up. If you have a link to include in a tweet, you can click to add one to the post. The form is very simple, and it sticks to the Twitter 140-character limit. You can post as many tweets as you like at Twitabit, and the service will keep them queued up until Twitter is back online, at which time it'll start posting them to Twitter.

The concept of giving a third part service your Twitter account information may make some people squeamish, so if that bothers you, it may not be the right solution. Additionally, the service doesn't really say how it manages to authenticate you to Twitter (or even if it bothers) if Twitter is down, so it's possible that the service stores your username and password until it detects Twitter is back online and then posts your messages.

Even so, the service's developers use Twitter themselves and interact with people who use the service frequently via their Twitter feed. They may not have an "about" page or a privacy policy, but the fact that the service is built on top of Twitter's own open API and the fact that the developers are easy to get a hold of are both encouraging.

Twitabit is definitely useful, especially if Twitter outages have you so frustrated that you're looking elsewhere for a micro-blogging tool. The service might help a lot of anxious Twitter users get their fix when the service is down, but in reality the fact that the service exists is a symptom of a larger problem that Twitter will have to remedy if they expect to remain popular.