If you think about it Twitter is a bit of a walled garden, a closed system as Sean Carmody has pointed out. You have to be on Twitter to use Twitter; a little like Facebook or AOL. Maybe what we need to step beyond Twitter into an open message distribution service, this would help with the load issue if nothing else.
Stepping beyond the walled garden will allow services like Twitter to jump the shark and avoid the problems AOL had. They were popular with the early adopters to start with, then the mob got bored and moved on, the shininess and gloss just waned away.
