This post is for all of you who are still wondering what the point of twitter is. Yesterday, I was once again awakened by twitter’s speed and usefulness when news broke of the 4.3 Earthquake in California (San Jose). I had twitter spy.appspot up surfing my usual catch all keyword “trends” and was suddenly flooded by chatter of the earthquake. At first this news was pretty alarming to me because my Sister, brother in-law, their 3 boys and my Mom are all in the Bay Area. knowing that a 4.3 is a fairly minor earthquake I was not in too much panic but I decided to check into the severity of the tremor on a more “credible” site like CNN. No luck. I tried a number of other sources ABC News, Fox News even local Bay Area news stations. Nadda, nothing to be found or mentioned. It was at that moment that I caught myself thinking “why do we even need the media when we have twitter?”.
One could argue that a 4.3 earthquake does not warrant the need for immediate national or global news coverage. One could also argue that some of the news you hear on twitter is not reliable or credible. I understand all that. On the other hand, I believe that news delivered by the people for the people, free from hype and spin and at lightning speed is probably the best news you could ever hope for. Of the 533 earthquake “tweets” that went out yesterday (within 30 seconds of the quake) there were probably a few inaccurate statements made. Regardless, I knew about the quake before non-twitter’ers. That’s my point.
In my opinion twitter is still very much evolving and is in it’s infancy as a community and in it’s potential/purpose. One thing that is very apparent to me, is that by following twitter you begin to place your finger on the pulse of an extremely widespread population of influencers and informers.
Random but roughly related side note:
Kevin Spacey -> is now on twitter http://twitter.com/KevinSpacey
