The major disruption to Twitter last week was made all the more embarrassing by its huge popularity, says Charles Cooper, but are its recurring technical problems scaling the service a blip that Twitterholics will put up with?

Cooper doesn’t think so, a word of warning from him:

“Is Twitter so addictive that we can’t live without it? Don’t believe the hype.

“I know a lot of tweet-deprived people who made it through the weekend in fine fettle.

“Remember what happened to Friendster? The service started to bog down and failed to recover in time.

“The upshot: It lost its mojo and its users defected to the likes of MySpace and Facebook.”

Cooper adds that if the gremlins are dispatched from the Twitter machine then the service could have a bright future – but warns that the next fad is just round the corner if problems persist.