This weekend, I had planned on honing my Twitter skills in preparation for launching ChicagoScope2.com later this month -- but the darn thing seems to have imploded. Granted, Twitter is free and at some point you get what you pay for, but the question for me is whether the service is going to be reliable.

And by "reliable," I'll go ahead and show my age by suggesting that a great definiton of reliable is what the phone company gave us in, say, 1968. Even during the Colorado snowstorms of my youth that closed roads and schools and caused lights to flicker, our phone still worked.

Sadly, that's not the case now. In my Jefferson Park apartment building, landline phone service is dicey at best. Whenever it starts raining or snowing, calls bleed through to one another until the line apparently is saturated -- and then everything goes back to normal. When the line begins to dry out, there's a repeat performance.

Complaints about this problem issue invariably ignited a Yalta Conference about who owns the defective line, where it connects, whether the punchdown board is involved, etc., etc., etc.

I experienced similar problems issues with Vonage. It just wouldn't work reliably. The only positive from the experience was that when the digital line would cut out, the person talking on the other end often wouldn't realize they were talking to themselves until they came up for air -- in the case of one friend, that would be minutes.

Of course, much as I enjoy the Slowsky commercials, Comcast hasn't exactly been a paragon of reliability for me, either. I know more than a few people who are looking forward to bona fide competition.

Maybe that's what Twitter needs. When you have a free service, can uptime be anything other than a free-for-all?

By the way, does anybody know how Twitter makes money? The best guess I heard awhile back is that they get a cut of the SMS message fees that users' service providers charge, but I haven't read much about that theory lately.

I'd be more than willing to pay for a more-robust Twitter experience. An annual rate of $25 a year (that's what I pay for Flickr Pro) would be acceptable.

ChicagoScope feedback line: 312-683-5272. Send e-mail to ChicagoScope@gmail.com.