The Twittering Masses
dan tynan on Aug 05 2008 at 5:21 am | Filed under: US Airways Magazine, Web 2.0
Micro-blogs offer new ways to reach out and touch—140 characters at a time
(This post originally appeared in the August issue of US Airways Magazine.)
When American photojournalist James Buck was taken into custody by Egyptian security forces last April, he didn’t call his lawyer, the US embassy, or his mother. He whipped out his cell phone and posted a single word — “Arrested” — to his Twitter blog.
Within minutes, hundreds of Twitter users who were following Buck’s updates went to work, calling the embassy and pressuring the authorities to release him, which they did the next day. (Buck’s Egyptian translator, Mohammed Maree, was also arrested and remains in custody as I write this. Buck has set up a site – jameskarlbuck.com – in an effort to get him released.)
It was a big moment for Buck, but an even bigger one for Twitter and other micro-blogs.
If you’ve never heard of Twitter, here’s a quick primer. Twitter is like text messaging from your cell phone, only you can also do it from the Web; instead of sending a message to just one person you can send it to thousands of people at once. You can choose to follow anyone’s updates (called “tweets”), and anyone can follow yours. The only rule is that each tweet can be no longer than 140 characters; otherwise, you can tweet until your fingers are raw.
Sound silly? You bet. Until Buck’s story went national, Twitter was viewed by many as yet another tool for the hopelessly self absorbed. Now it’s becoming a new form of personal broadcasting, and it’s starting to reach critical mass.
There are now at least 1.5 million registered Twitter users, according to TwitDir, a directory of the Twitterati, and that number is starting to spike. The site has inspired at least half a dozen similar micro-blogs with even more ridiculous names – like Pownce, Tumblr, Jaiku, and Plurk. Facebook, Linked In, and major other social networks offer status updates where you can essentially tweet within the confines of each network, or simply pick up your tweetfeed directly from Twitter.
Every day there seems to be another new service that piggybacks on Twitter – like TweetScan (a search engine), Twennis (a running update of professional tennis tournaments), and Twubble (a way to find new followers). As Elmer Fudd might say, Twitter is twuly a phenomenon.
But in Twitterland, all is not tweet.
At last March’s South by Southwest Interactive conference, tech journalist Sarah Lacey was nearly booed offstage by a “Twitter mob” in the audience, who used the service to coordinate their heckling as she interviewed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Social media maven Ariel Waldman recently went public with charges that she was stalked and harassed by another Twitter user, yet got no help from Twitter management when she complained.
Spammers now employ scripts that automatically follow Twitter users at random, in the hopes they will reciprocate and follow back (as most people currently do). When they amass enough followers, the spammers will likely use Twitter to send out ads and links to malicious Web sites.
But all of this is happening because Twitter and its cousins actually work, in a strange way. They give you a window into another person’s life, even if it’s only open a tiny crack and what’s going on isn’t always dramatic or even interesting. You develop a real sense of how people spend their time (or, at least, how they want you to think they spend their time) that’s as intimate as most other kinds of conversation, if not as personal.
As my circle of friends grows wider but more geographically disparate, these services let me stay in touch without enormous effort. They’re less awkward than a phone call, with less commitment to read and respond than email.
And it’s nice to know that folks are out there listening to my tweets. Because, one day, I might need one of them to bail me out.
Follow Dan Tynan on Twitter at twitter.com/Tynan_on_tech — if you dare.
[...] tight recently on US Airways flight #146 to Hawaii and flipped open the in-flight magazine to an article by Dan Tynan on Twitter, I knew it was time to blog it. Two nights before, 100 other people and I [...]