Gmail goes down - Twitter goes berserk - Eish discovers Tweetdeck

As I write this Google's Gmail is down and millions ,somewhere around 113 million users, have no access to their email and the only information coming from Google is "We're aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a small subset of users.
The affected users are unable to access Gmail. We will provide an
update by February 24, 2009 6:30 AM PST detailing when we expect to
resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an
estimate and may change"
Chris M had already blogged about how Twitter had helped him out while he was Gmail-less. So to keep up with the developments I turned to Twitter, a 'micro-blogging' platform I use sporadically when I am bored (ironically notoriuos for the amount of downtime experienced by it's users).
The problem I now had though, was that I purposefully keep the number of people I follow to a minimum so how was I going to keep up with developments being tweeted by the thousands of Twitter-ers?
Enter Tweetdeck. A utility I have known about for some time, checked out more than once but never gotten the impetus to install. It took a quick Adobe Air install and a quicker application installation and voila Tweetdeck was up and running. But how does this help?
Tweetdeck allows you to initiate a phrase search, this appears in a separate column in the application and then updates this column as new tweets that match the search appear. This is not limited to those you follow!

So now I sit back and watch 10 sec updates of the worldwide confusion, frustration and anger as they come to terms with the potential pitfalls of keeping your emails in the cloud!