Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.

This morning I wasn’t able to access Gmail or Google Apps Mail. At first I thought it was an isolated issue, something wrong with my internet connection or the like. However, I got a bit suspicious when I was able to access Calendar, Docs and Contacts, which are accessed through the same interface. Up to that point, I believed it to be an isolated issue – searching on Google (yes, thankfully the web search still worked…) yielded no recent results – expected, since the Google crawler won’t access web pages as often as every few minutes to update the search results that are displayed.

However, Twitter was a completely different story. The entire community was abuzz with talk of gmail going down, possible fixes (IMAP / POP3 still working, etc), but what’s most impressive is the real-time aspect of it all. At Twitterfall (search for ‘gmail’ in the search box to the left), you can track keywords on Twitter and they will appear in real time in a list.  For example, clicking on the link above will yield something like this:

Although they should have been appearing in real time, you can see at the top that there were over 100 tweets queued for display – they were coming in from all over the world so fast that the website literally couldn’t keep up!

Another nice visual tool was Twitscoop – it shows the current most popular user searches on the main Twitter website, with a larger word meaning more people were searching for it.  Can you guess which came out on top?

Although not as scrutinised or as verifiable as major news websites like BBC News or CNN, Twitter is able to provide you with both real time updates to world events (such as the Mumbai terrorism attacks at the end of last year), and interesting statistics, so much so that you can really get a feel for what the general feeling of people worldwide are thinking.

Click here to see my Twitter page, and feel free to follow me – my Facebook updates get pushed through here, so if you haven’t added me there, then you can always follow the updates on this public page.