Twitter proves it value yet again
As the news of Benazir Bhutto assassination spread around the local and global news services yesterday, twitter was in there with first hand accounts, and information, thoughts, and theories that would never have shown up in the standard media. Moreover, twitter proved to be the best way to gauge what was happening as it happened, as well as popular sentiment about the assassination.
Few events in our lives will have as far reaching an impact as a successful opposition presidential candidate of a nuclear-armed country being assassinated.
Everyone in this kind of instance has to move fast, and twitter seemed to be the way that people moved information very quickly globally about the attack.
When Hurricane Katrina struck, great weight was given to the speed with which the blogs swung into action. Twitter is proving far quicker at relaying reaction. This has huge implications for business.
World events can disrupt markets, impact buying decisions, affect entire economies. If the speed at which we are now being bombarded with news is literally in the moment, then enterprises will need to have appropriate process response mechanisms in place. I’m not convinced those exist. Source: ZDNet
Think about that one for a moment.
If you are a business, or even a government, what more interesting way to latch into the collective consciousness and information stream than twitter?
If you are a business and your business relies on information, especially those events that can have an influence on markets, commodities, or otherwise, this makes even more sense to start paying attention to systems other than blogs. While twitter is interesting, if used right, that flash mob could be using mobile twitter to coordinate their movements and actions.
If you are the police, worry about that idea, if you are an activist/hacktivist start thinking about that one. The use of Twitter, SMS and other ephemeral short duration communications across many channels can alter an event and its outcome.
Blogs, news, television, none of them moved or can move fast enough, on scene folks using short message systems, that is harder to stop, detect, intercept, spy on, wiretap, or otherwise.
This is where things get interesting. There was no way that the government of Pakistan or otherwise could have stopped the flow of information out of that country. If you are a repressive government, that just ads to the complexity of managing countrywide communications, that is what makes this fascinating, sometimes a disruptive technology has some interesting and unintended side effects.
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