Gadget Maven Blog

Forget trees falling in forests. If a plane crashes into a bakkie on a remote Gauteng road, did it happen if no one is there to Tweet about it?
Twitter, the hugely popular micro-blogging service, came into it’s own over the weekend, breaking the remarkable story of a freak accident, miraculously in which no one died. Then, the nearby “freeborders” dragged the two injured occupants from the plane moments before it was engulfed in flame.
In the past, such news would be a two or three paragraph story buried on an inside page days later, recording the accident and little more. In today’s always connected, Twitterverse it was a dramatic, visceral, heart-stopping, heroics-filled story that thousands followed online and was good enough to be the front page lead for The Times newspaper.
It was a lead story by virtue of any three of the utterly amazing aspects: a plane flying head-on into a bakkie (which coincidentally stopped it from going over a cliff), no fatalities and the heroics of the nearby witnesses, led by Jono Herbst. This is real life at it’s very best.
It certainly helped that the extreme sports participants are some of South Africa’s most sophisticated internet and social media professionals.
As Craig Rodney, whose dramatic picture was the first to be posted and claimed the front page, said to me later: “We got the pilots out and we all breathed a sigh of relief. Then the phones came out and we started Tweeting,” (as individual Twitter updates are known).
Any doubt that Twitter was a geeky pastime evaporated a few months ago, as it became the fastest growing social media network. Last year already Barack Obama had announced his candidacy for the US presidency via Twitter, and by the time Oprah Winfrey started Tweeting early this year, the world was ready to forget Facebook.
We saw Twitters gain mainstream appeal in South Africa with our own elections in April, when celebrities picked up on it; and Radio 702’s Aki Anastasiou’s aerial Twitter pictures ended up on the BBC’s website to illustrate their election story.
Twitter’s website traffic has surged, making it the fastest growing social networking site, although a lot of people use other software applications to access it, like TweetDeck, Nambu or TwitterFon.
“And it’s going to overtake all the others,” says Arthur Goldstuck, MD of World Wide Worx. “In this country it’s still the tool of IT, media and marketing people. Outside of those three distinct categories, it’s virtually unheard of. Word of mouth on Twitter is huge.”
As was pointed out by another media-savvy Twitterer during last week’s Air France plane crash over the Atlantic Ocean, Twitter was running about an hour ahead of traditional media.
Twitter may seem like an oddity to the uninitiated, but it’s recently been bathed in good publicity and even has Google worried.
“People really want to do stuff real time and I think they [Twitter] have done a great job about it,” Google’s co-founder Larry Page said last month. “I think we have done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per-second basis,” Page told his own Google’s Zeitgeist conference.
While Google’s sophisticated search engine can take hours or days to be updated, whereas Twitter’s stream of, admittedly unstructured, are almost instantaneous.
Time magazine, which maintains its royal crown in an ever-more online world, splashed Twitter across its most recent front cover trumpetting: “How Twitter will change the way we live”.
Time quotes technology writer Clive Thompson, who “calls this ‘ambient awareness’: by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don’t think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.”
Ashton Kutcher, who was the first Twitter user to reach one million followers (in a mock war with CNN’s Larry King to raise awareness about African aid), has emerged as the most popular celebrity on Facebook.
Kutcher, writing in Time’s 100 list of powerful and influential people, is unequivocal in his praise for Twitter’s founders: “Years from now, when historians reflect on the time we are currently living in, the names Biz Stone and Evan Williams will be referenced side by side with the likes of Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Guglielmo Marconi, Philo Farnsworth, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs — because the creation of Twitter by Stone, 35, Williams, 37, and Jack Dorsey, 32, is as significant and paradigm-shifting as the invention of Morse code, the telephone, radio, television or the personal computer.”
Hyperbole perhaps, But think back – if you knew, or can remember – to when Williams launched another radical new communications platform called Blogger.com. Bought by Google, it was one of the first such applications of this self-publishing paradigm we call Web 2.0.
Blogging was laughingly dismissed for it’s too-short, MTV generation, two-paragraph writing style. No one is laughing anymore. Especially not about Twitter.

• This article first appeared in The Times newspaper on 9 June 2009.

The TImes
9 June 2009
http://www.thetimes.co.za/Entertainment/Article.aspx?id=101431 9 .June 2009

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