Should Twitter shut down?

Twitter is very famous now, and come along with being famous means there will be many users who are signing-up and trying to access their accounts at the same time. Can Twitter handle it?

Rafe Needleman from Webware has shared his pessimistic on the bad Twitter's service lately, and as usual his writing is intriguing and good to read:

I used to love Twitter. But the site's pogo status--it's up! it's down! it's up again!--is driving me away. Every time Twitter users go to Twitter.com or to their Twitter app and they see the "Fail Whale," an error message, or just a non-responsive site, they're that much less likely to come back the next time.

Until the Twitter team can get the service working again for good, here's what they should strongly consider: Close the site. Take it offline. Put plywood over the doors and windows, as it were, with a big "We're remodeling!" sign on the front. Ask users if they want to be e-mailed when the site reopens for business and don't send that e-mail until the thing is fixed. Really fixed. Then have a grand reopening party.

It needs to be reliable. Twitter is not just a toy. It's a communications platform that people were just beginning to rely on before it overloaded and got flakey. Now, no one can rely on it and we're learning that at any given moment, there's a very good chance that Twitter will be offline. The more people who learn that, the fewer people will visit, and the more people will walk across the street to competing services. Remember how Friendster lost its momentum?

If Twitter can't deliver a reliable experience, I think its best bet is to close until it can. That way, we can all come back to the site at the same time, all together, instead of each of us showing up one by one and finding it deserted.

What do you think? Should Twiter be shutted down for awhile until they able to fix their problems? If so, can you Twitter-addicts can live without Twitter service for that 'awhile'?

[blogged with my Treo 750v]