Twitter - a news system or a nervous system?

Rory Cellan Jones reports on the BBC about Twitter breaking the China Earthquake first:

When I logged on to my desktop Twitter application (sad, I know) it was alive with Tweets about the earthquake in China. Most of them were from the celebrated technology blogger Robert Scoble, who is famous, perhaps notorious, for receiving a Twitter message every second of the day.

Another year, another shiny new platform capable of truly wondrous things far greater than its true ability Last year 'twas Facebook, but as we noted in late 2007 the Chatterati had moved on to Twitter, and now the Beeb's early MSM adopters are onto it! (Do keep up chaps, Scoble's mainly off on Friendfeed these days anyway )

Anyway, on with the show....

He is based in California, but thousands of miles away from the quake he was providing breaking news about it, linking to sites like the BBC and the New York Times, even providing a first picture - though how authentic that is remains to be seen. He now claims that Twitter had the breaking news even before the United States Geological Survey, which provides early warnings of seismic events.

Let's see, as this story unfolds, whether this is the moment when Twitter comes of age as a platform which can bring faster coverage of a major news event than traditional media, while allowing participants and onlookers to share their experiences.

Actually, Twitter has apparently come of age before....see here

I come not to praise nor bury Twitter, but to put it into context. Actually, anybody on any form of digital media - email, Twitter, Instant Messenger, SMS - will get the news very fast. In fact I hypothesise that SMS was probably the fastest out of there, it usually is. (Did I hear anyone talking about SMS "coming of Age" in the London bombings, or about the emails flying out at 9/11 after the mobile masts and telephone exchanges went down?? No? Thought not.....they just did their job without celebrity blogger endorsement )

Twitter, like email, has a multicast (near-broadcast) capability, which was why it would have hit the mostest fastest that way. Twitter can run off a simpler mobile so has a better chance of of getting out first before email, but it won't be by more than minutes. (Update - by a whole 3 minutes - talk about storms in teacups) But the Twitter fan-fraternity all hate email don'cha know (its sooo Web 1.0), so no ways is any of 'em going to admit that electronic news is just a function of whatever electronic screen you were watching at the time that would have given you the news. If Rory had logged onto a similar global email group first, on say Yahoo Groups, I can guarantee the news would have been there too - it was on mine - here's a Broadsight Meme Search Engine output of Non Twitter sources for example. Heck, I'll bet people were even telling their friends about it on Facebook and MySpace too, but no one's interested in writing about them anymore...



That aside, the thought that Twitter is a "news system" per se is also not specifically accurate in my view - its more useful to think of it as a comms nervous network, where a stimulation starts to prompt signals to back flow up the system as they occur. How accurate the signal is, is another thing entirely. The 140 character limit is great for short datasets but also mean that huge amount of noise goes with any signal (the "river of drivel") leading many leading comms thinkers to hypothesize that in "microblog" services like Twitter, Filtering is more critical than communication per se.

(We have been on Twitter for at least a year, so yes we do know how it works, and value its unique attributes - and potential - its got its uses, but its just another comms medium people !!!)

Now for it to really come of age, lets see what Twitter can do to organise help. I haven't noticed it in the Burmese forefront - SMS, Mobile and Email are doing the donkey work there.

Update 13/05 - good post this morning on Ogilvy China Watch, highlighting the hubris of the Twitterpimp crowd:

Twitter’s immediacy was nice, but by no means unique. The whole time I was twittering, my wife was on her instant messengers, with both QQ and MSN Live open. She was also monitoring all the portals’ news flashes on the quake. I didn’t feel like I had any more information than she did

Twitter’s public nature was of some real value both for ordinary folk and for professional journalists, who were able to quickly identify English-speakers on the scene who could be interviewed. The broadcast nature of Twitter, while it can bore one to tears when used to gratuitously announce one’s pedestrian comings and goings, was in this case something that made it better than simple IM...

(abridged...)

...On balance, though, I feel there’s something fundamentally unsettling that attention within the Twitter community should have shifted at all off the matter at hand and on to a celebration of the particular communication tool we were using. There’s no doubt that it was useful, but by no means did this episode drive a nail in the coffin of traditional media, which by my lights has been exceptionally good in its reporting — Xinhua, Phoenix, CCTV, and many other Chinese news organizations have really taken full advantage of the candor Beijing seems to be allowing and encouraging.

Plus the telling fact that an Ad Agency blog can be less suckered by the Twitter hype than the BBC.