Moment of Zen #12 (for July 7, 2009)

Twitter – the rising king
Boom of Blogs

Watch out for twitter: A new star is arising on the internet-market-firmament.
In May 2009 it reached a mass of 37,3mio Users!
(it already took out AOL with 33mio. Members!) His great aunt facebook got more than 200mio. users actually and the German equivalent had around a mio. users by 2006.
And even Google and Microsoft established an own search engine for twitterers.
twitter – which has to be described with ‘to chirp’ – is a social network where you can share everything you want (e.g. what you’re doing just at the moment – text, pictures, music, videos, … ) with everyone you want to let know. From your computer, your notebook or just easily from en-route. One Tweet offers a maximum volume of 140 signs.
It became popular in the widespread public during the 2008 elections. Former Senator Obama used this platform to reach young or mobile citizens as well. Knocking on the door, 11 a.m. in the morning won’t work if everyone is at work.
And even the German politicians try it out for their campaigns nowadays as well – but just with minor success. Twitter got around 50.000 German users by 2009. And the rate is increasing significantly. The news attracting the world’s attention – first published on Twitter. No professional medium is that quick. Information, pictures, videos etc. are uploaded immediately. Brilliant communication!
But is it trustable?
No funded research. No double-checking. No professionalism.
Good fast interesting interactive new media? Or doom of the serious traditional media? The Hudson hero, massacre of Winnenden, case of Neda, Michael Jackson’s death, … was all being twittered at first.
Everything unchecked, just published. Attracts the people’s attention. Shows skewed opinions, draws a broken-mirror-picture of the whole thing.
But not only private persons or news-companies use this platform to express themselves, people with special interest do so as well: companies try to communicate with their clients to do Public Relation and celebs use their social life to get even more famous. The problem is that you cannot check personal profiles. So some free-riders use the celeb’s publicity to get more famous as well or to just have made a good joke.
So - let twitter rule our information-agenda?



References:
http://www.n-tv.de/technik/Twitter-weiter-im-Hoehenflug-article395230.html
http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
http://studivz.irgendwo.org/
http://www.tecchannel.de/news/themen/business/410121/ueber_33_millionen_aol_mitglieder