Yesterday, Twitter had all sorts of problems.

Many users had frozen timelines that hadn’t updated for hours, and others weren’t able to log into the service at all.

A lot of people were, perhaps understandably, furious. It’s often only when something is taken away from us, or presented in a way that is less than ideal or compromised, that we begin to realise the true value.

I reported on the issue, and when it looked like it wasn’t going to be resolved anytime soon, I did what I felt was the smartest thing in the situation – I closed down my computer, and I went out for the day.

If necessary, I could still monitor events on my iPhone. But really, it was nice to have a break. I’m on Twitter a lot, but it isn’t my life. My work, family and friends all come first, although my television time has definitely taken a beating.

But it is a huge part of my life, and that holds true for a lot of other people, too, including brands, journalists, small business owners, and everybody else who uses the resource to send and receive news, information and ideas. Twitter needs to sort out these downtime problems, because as the platform continues to expand and becomes an even bigger part of all of our lives, these blackout periods are increasingly becoming unacceptable.

The company hasn’t quite reached the too big to fail stage, at least not yet, but the concept has. After two years, Twitter isn’t something I do anymore. It just is. I don’t think, “I should see what’s happening on Twitter!” and then make myself go there. It’s all very natural and organic. I realise it isn’t that way for everybody, or even most people, but, month by month, it’s getting there. Every day, there’s more of us, and less of them.

As Dave Winer suggests, Twitter needs to start thinking about the big picture and sharing the server workload, even if it’s with competitors. If it’s an issue, now, with an estimated hundred million users, just how big a problem, and how much of an impact is downtime going to make on our lives when a billion people are left blankly staring at the error page?

(And the best part? When it finally comes back, half of all the new tweets are users complaining that the service was down. I’m just grateful there was something on TV.)

All sorts of issues on Twitter today. Some users are experiencing frozen timelines, and while Twitter is aware of the problem lots of folks are still unable to see any new tweets from yesterday. Those whose timelines have been restored are reporting a gap in their history of up to 12 hours.

Others are unable to login to Twitter.com at all, and I’m getting the super-useful something is technically wrong page over and over.

You can feel it, too. The network seems like a wilderness.

Hit the comments to let me know of any problems you’re having.

UPDATE: The issue seems entirely tied into Twitter.com. I still can’t access the home page. However, all Twitter clients (TweetDeck, Seesmic, Tweetie, HootSuite etc) appear to be functioning normally, although many timelines have been impacted simply through a lack of updates from those who predominately access Twitter via the web.

(Inspired by a musing from Robert Scoble – more on this later.)

Increasingly, your choice of username on Twitter is becoming a really big deal. Twitter profiles rank really well on most search engines, often at the very top of the results, and as more and more people join the network the right name – both in a sense of accuracy (certainly for brands) and, for convenience and retweet value, length – is becoming important.

Having an accurate username that reflects or exactly matches your business or brand name is of course ideal. Twitter has policy in place that allows them to “reclaim usernames on behalf of business or individuals that hold legal claim or trademark to those names”, which is fine and how it should be (even if it isn’t always actioned).

But what about the little guys? What if somebody has the Twitter username that we want. Shouldn’t we be able to buy it from them?

Here’s the thing – buying and selling Twitter profile names is a serious breach of their TOS. A few websites have tried to get around this, but it’s essentially illegal.

Earlier today, Robert Scoble expressed an interest in the essentially dormant @s username, later boosting his bid with a $5,000 offer to charity.

This offer was then doubled by @shervin, raising the valuation to $10,000.

Ultimately, the auction is likely to prove moot, as Twitter themselves now own the @s username. But Scoble’s query is legitimate, because as Twitter continues to creep up on 100 million users, the availability of even remotely credible usernames is rapidly beginning to thin out. Which raises a valid question: should you be punished with a crappy username on Twitter simply because you came to the service late?

Internet domain names are, of course, bought and sold en masse. The best and most lucrative domains are quickly snapped up, and can command an enormous selling price on the open market.

Why should it be any different on Twitter? Doesn’t it make sense for the company itself to set up an internal auction system so that the top profile names can be sold to the highest bidder? Okay, so they’ve got legitimate issues with squatting, but if they increased the verification process for all sign-ups to the platform then this would become far less of an issue, almost overnight.

And even if they didn’t, so what? This open system works for the rest of the internet – first come, first served. And if you still want it, you have to pay for it. Naturally they would continue to claim back profiles that clearly breached trademarks, become dormant or otherwise fell foul of TOS.

Of course, any two parties could do this secretly, and I’m sure this happens all the time, but the risk is enormous. If Twitter finds out, it’s goodbye to that account. And all that money.

Reality check: as Twitter expands, @business has a lot more clout and financial worth than @b129P43g. It isn’t just about your username, of course – you actually have to do a spot of engaging, too – but as a starting point, especially for brands and influencers, thevalue should not be underestimated. And if there’s a value there, I say people should be able to pay for it.

Twitter has a strange, hot-and-cold policy to the suspension of what they refer to as ‘impersonator’ accounts, and which the rest of the world refers to as fakes.

You may recall the suspension of the Christopher Walken spoof account in March 2009. At the time, the profile was nearing 100,000 fans, which was a big deal a year ago, and was enormously popular, picking up a ton of retweets and mentions and also getting some attention in the mainstream press. However, the parody breached Twitter’s TOS regarding impersonation and was removed with no warning or fanfare, at least not from Twitter themselves.

That’s fine – that’s their rule, after all – but the problem is, much like anything else that falls under official Twitter policy, they seem to thrive on an attitude of ‘one rule for one’.

The (clearly) fake Michael Jordan account is a prime example. I mean, it’s a hoot, but it’s not real, and yet Twitter seems not to care about it one little bit.

Not only does that account have almost 75,000 followers, but it’s got the right username, too – @michaeljordan – and I can’t begin to imagine why Michael Jordan himself doesn’t do something about it. Or, for that matter, any of the many other representatives of the multi-billion dollar franchise that Jordan’s name represents.

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Not the most useful of error messages, is it?

Three things I’m curious about:

1. Do the Twitter engineers automatically get sent a report each and every time this page appears?
2. Does it go into detail as to why it happened, or just say it happened?
3. If not (and even so), why is there no ‘report this error’ button?

Most of the time, this error can be ‘fixed’ with a simple refresh. But not always, and you’d be amazed how often default pages like this are used as a catch-all for a myriad of serious faults on major websites.

The dreaded fail whale is increasingly a thing of the past, but I see one of these error pages at least once a day. I really hope somebody important is paying attention and this isn’t all just lip service.