I must be getting old – or maybe I am just slow – as it took me some time to start appreciating Twitter. I have had an account since 2007 but never really used it. In fact the breakthrough for me was when we started using it to communicate our network status to our offices spread across the globe. Only then I really started to take an interest.
Lately TIME published a some interesting articles about Twitter titled “How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live” of which I’d like to give you some quotes.
Some celebrity Twitterers have crossed the million-follower mark, effectively giving them a broadcast-size audience.
In the past month, Twitter has added a search box that gives you a real-time view onto the chatter of just about any topic imaginable.
Put those three elements together — social networks, live searching and link-sharing — and you have a cocktail that poses what may amount to the most interesting alternative to Google’s near monopoly in searching.
Last month an anticommunist uprising in Moldova was organized via Twitter. Twitter has become so widely used among political activists in China that the government recently blocked access to it, in an attempt to censor discussion of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
And most impressively
The U.S. State Department doesn’t usually take an interest in the maintenance schedules of dotcom start-ups. But over the weekend, officials there reached out to Twitter and asked them to delay a network upgrade that was scheduled for Monday night. The reason? To protect the interests of Iranians using the service to protest the presidential election that took place on June 12.
More about that in “Iran Protests: Twitter, the Medium of the Movement“
