A Tale of Two Twitters - Iran vs #140Conf

Two events sent the Twitterverse abuzz this week.

Firstly, the sublime. Twitter, owing to is unique architecture - Unified Comms across multiple device types and networks, and an asymmetric, asynchronous, dispersed pub/sub system - was key to getting news in and out of Iran and (to a lesser extent) allowing opposition to the Iranschluss to combine and collaborate. It was seen to be so key that the US government asked them to delay system maintenance downtime till Iranian midnight.

Secondly, the opposite extreme - $1,000 a head for a 2 day conference on Twitter in NYC (or equity in your startup up to $500 if you were too poor to pay). The twitterstream (#140conf) has the occasional sparkling nugget in a sewer of sludge, not a river of data. I'm sure it was a fine conference, but thems big bucks for such a small thing....do I hear the words "hype curve"? (Contrast that with the 1/2 day UK one which was a small contribution to charity).

It has already been roundly lampooned by the Great White Snarks of the chatterati, Loren Feldman and Paul Carr, so 'nuff said. ( Careful boys - the Hudson is close and concrete boots are cheap.... ) .

Actually I have to pass on Loren Feldman's sage advice on the Secret of Success in Twitter:

Just post links to your shit, the occasional fake motivational bullshit, and then post more links to your shit. The end.

That'll be $1,000 please

Still, as Jonathan Zittrain noted, It is easy for Twitter feeds to be echoed everywhere else in the world. The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what make it so powerful.

And as an added bonus you can shade your avatar green to show your solidarity with the Iranians as theirs turn red with their blood. (Quick quiz - how many of you know that green was the colour of the Fatimid Caliphate, and what it stands for....)

More worrying though is that one session in the latter event has an impact on the former. The Israeli's were originally out-twitted in the recent Gaza conflict but rapidly came up with countermeasures, as the Jerusalem Post explains:

For their part, the Israelis began using Twitter in the early days of the conflict in Gaza, when Saranga logged onto Twitter and found, he said, "incorrect information" from anonymous sources. "The official voice of Israel and the voice of the Israelis should be put out there so people will get the entire picture," he said. Today, the Israeli Consulate has more than 6,400 followers on Twitter.

The Iranians were taken by surprise, but tinpot despots around the world have taken notice, next time there will be far more Twitter Counter Measures in place, and its is not the be all and end all, as the article refernced above notes:

"I think the idea of a Twitter revolution is very suspect," says Gaurav Mishra, co-founder of 20:20 WebTech, a company that analyzes the effects of social media. "The amount of people who use these tools in Iran is very small and could not support protests that size."