When a 5.6-magnitude earthquake hit California in July, the earliest reports were not seen on cable news or nytimes.com. Instead, the first drips of information trickled out from the affected areas via Twitter. For the uninitiated, Twitter is a social networking sight where users type in what they’re doing and send the information to their “followers.” Despite the cultish sound of that, “followers” are just other Twitter users who have signed up to keep track of you. That’s it. The discourse ranges from news updates and funny musings, to mundane “I’m sitting at my desk” updates, all of it extremely brief. (There’s a limit of 160 characters to all posts.) Why should you find interesting what anyone else is doing, especially when the level of minutiae posted can reach “I’m typing my status into twitter”-type levels? We’re not exactly sold on that one either. Still, every time we try to write Twitter off, something like that aforementioned earthquake happens and we think maybe, just maybe, this thing has the potential to change the world. If you want to become a follower, go to twitter.com, sign up and look for CL_tampa and/or joebardi.
This article appears in Sep 10-16, 2008.