How Twitter has changed the World. November 3rd, 2009.
To be honest, when I first heard of Twitter, my thoughts were that it was for people far too much time on their hands who narcissistically wanted to broadcast every random thought that crossed their minds.
And while this is true in many instances, I was surprised to find that there are also some very smart, professional, forward thinking people and businesses using Twitter intelligently.
So what is twitter? Well if you ask Google you’ll get an answer like this:
Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that allows you answer the question, “What are you doing?” by sending short text messages 140 characters in length, called “tweets”, to your friends, or “followers.”
The above description, I think, is now wrong. It may have described what Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stones envisioned when Twitter was first born, however, it is now so much more.
Twitter allows you to connect, communicate and grow your following. But the interesting part is that they, your followers can also connect with you as well as being able to connect with each other. And this is how Social Media is changing the world.
Not be too dramatic, however, what we’re living through is the largest increase in expressive capability in human history. Pretty big claim eh?! Let me back it up. There have only been 4 other periods in history where media has changed enough to qualify as a revolution.
There’s the famous one, the printing press, one way communication that turned Europe upside down in the mid 14 hundreds. And then a couple of hundred years ago there was the innovation of the two way communication device, the telephone.
Then around 150 years ago, recorded media (other than print). First photos, followed by recorded sound and then movies all encoded into physical objects. Finally, about 100 years ago, the electromagnetic spectrum was harnessed to send sound and images through the air. TV and Radio was born.
This was the media landscape as we knew it in the 20th century, and then the Internet came along and changed everything. But it’s not just the Internet. It’s the way social media allows us to communicate using the Internet.
Last May china had a terrible 7.9 magnitude earthquake with masses of destruction. What was different about this earthquake was that it was reported as it happened. People were taking photos, filming buildings shaking, they were uploading these to QQ, Chinas largest internet service. They were on Facebook, they were Twittering and there were people all over the world listening. The BBC got their first wind of the quake through twitter.
Twitter announced the earth quake before the U.S national earthquake information centre. The last time china had a quake of that magnitude it took them 3 months to admit it had happened!
Twitter and all other social media has changed the way we communicate, consume media, share information, basically the world! And a question I always get asked is ‘can Twitter be used for business?’… I’ll answer this question in my next post!
