Twitter grows up: Lessons from the Iran experience

BetaNews ^ | 6/18/2009 | Carmi Levi

[La Lydia]

I am about as low tech as you can get, and still manage to use a computer, and I signed up for Twitter in three minutes. You just make up a name and a password, follow the directions and you’re in. Ditto Facebook, but I find Facebook to be hideously annoying. I don’t use it except to look for something specific.

[Jeff Head]

twitter deals in text...not pics and not video (though links to those things can be and are sent) very easy and relatively low bandwidth for comm.

It also uses the internet for wide area (spelled world-wide) coverage.

It is like an organized, world-wide chat room, where you can direct messages privately to individual members, to discussion topics specifically (where they can only be seen by those searching on those specific topics) or to the open air where, according to how you set up your account, anyone can see it.

It also allows these text messages to be sent back and forth to those same criteria, using your cell phone texting capability.

Very wide open, very wide ranging, very innovative...and extremely timely for this uprising in Iran. A literal God send for them actually because it has let them get the word out and continues to do so. Iran will have to drop the whole cellular network and internet to stop it.

[mysterio]

I am a twitter fan. I like tweetdeck as a more user friendly interface. I have followed breaking news, and it's pretty cool. But it tweets about every five seconds, so you need it in its own category.

Check it out if you are interested in breaking news.

[bigbob]

I don’t get it either.

The difference between Twitter and a fax machine is, a fax machine does something useful.

[Palladin]

Twitter was a godsend to those people in the hotel in Mumbai (Bombay) who were hiding in their rooms trying to get help while Al Quaeda terrorists roamed the halls looking for victims.

It is certainly a remarkable tool for citizen journalists, who can bypass both editors and censors while getting fresh news out to the whole world.

The dinosaur media of the alphabet networks should be quaking in their boots.

[Mmogamer]

Could you redo that link please? I just signed up at twitter so still noob there hehe

[abb]

http://www.libertyroundtable.org/library/essay.drudge.html

Anyone With A Modem Can Report On The World

Address Before the National Press Club
by Matt Drudge, June 2, 1998

[La Lydia]

http://twitter.com/ConNews?utm_source=follow&utm_campaign=twitter20080331162631&utm_medium=email

Then click “follow.”

[Larry Lucido]

Fax machines were the means of communicating during Tiannamen. Twenty years later, more stuff comes along. Now, I know as much about Twitter now as I did about fax machines back then, which is little. But my lack of knowledge isn’t proof of their respective utility.