Twitter is one of those services I just can’t make up my mind about. On one hand it provides a simple and quick way to get information about what’s going out there whether it be updates from friends or news from my favorite sites. On the other hand, it can get annoying when people use it for the simplest mundane types of things like, “I see an ant.” Then of course there are the times when Twitter simply doesn’t work which has happened on more than one occasion. Complaints aside, one area where Twitter shines is when it acts as a news-wire when something big happens. This week Twitter was more of a news-wire service when the earthquake occurred earlier this week in the Los Angeles area.
The Tiwtter blog took the time to point out how it took only seconds for the first Twitter update to appear saying there was an earthquake in California. It took several minutes after the quake before official news started to emerge. At that point there were already thousands of people who had “Twittered” about it. The real-time aspect of Twitter is what makes it something completely unique and different from what other news services are able to offer, and Twitter updates are first-hand accounts.
Twitter put together a graph that shows when the earthquake occurred, and then the surge in Twitter updates that followed. The graph also points out how it took about 9 minutes after the quake before the AP wire sent out the news to other news agencies. Take a look:
Is Twitter becoming a news-wire? In this situation it was certainly a popular form of communication during the earthquake, and surprisingly enough, it was able to with-stand the influx of Twitter updates without problems. If anything, this earthquake showed just how powerful real-time micro-messaging services like Twitter can be.
I’m sure those earthquake tweets were the kind of top-notch journalism that the Associated Press is looking for. I’m guessing it just took them 9 minutes to write a blurb and round up the vital info on the quake (where/when/size).
That said, if someone wrote up a website that compiled data from Twitter and displayed the trends by country/state, they could make a ton of money. A sort of informal news/”how does the country feel” site.
I don’t understand why we need twitter since Facebook already has a ‘what are you doing’ feature.
Can anyone explain this to me?
Also, is there any way to just post your tweet once and have it show up on facebook and twitter?
Twitter and FB are working on that with Facebook Connect as we speak actually.
Because some people don’t like/use Facebook? Even if millions of people are on a social network, there will people who aren’t. Maybe they just want to be able to tweet from where ever they want (I believe Ryan wrote about tweeting from your browsers address bar last week)
i’d love to see twitter DIAF, but i’m afraid there are way too many people out there that love generating and following this type of mindless chatter 24/7.
Thanks Andy, that makes sense.
In a general way I would say blogging platforms dissipate news much faster and more accurately than formal news media. When bombs exploded at London’s subway on July 7, 2005, the news spread like wildfire through numerous blogs written by the same people who directly suffered the effects of the explosions.
Journalism is at its best in amateur blogger’s hands no matter what software they use. I’m eager to read about the Olympics in China though informal blogs than through NBC, ABC, Fox News and so forth.
Unfortunately Twitter doesn’t offer any kind of geotagging of tweets, but some services are starting to come up with ways to offer that (such as Twinkle for the iPhone).
There are a lot of services that offer the “what are you doing” feature. Facebook is one of them, almost all messenger clients do, MySpace does, and many more. Some people, such as myself, don’t want all of the “features” these social networks have, and therefore turn to services like Twitter. That way our tweets can be seen by everyone, even people who aren’t signed up for an account.
Twitter definitely won’t be dying anytime soon. And not all of the chatter is mindless… if you follow the right people you can often be the first to get notified of big news events. For example, there is the Twitter account for Mars Phoenix news:
[twitter.com]
It will be interesting to follow the Olympics in the blogosphere, but I’m really excited about the Silverlight streaming of the events online. I can’t wait to see how that plays out.