the imbroglio

Glenn Greenwald expresses something like my own sentiments about Twitter:

At the risk of appearing as crotchety as [John Cole] does, I share that bewilderment.  About Twitter messages, John says “they all read like cell phone text messages between 12 year olds,” and indeed, the only purpose I can discern is that it provides a format for expressing thoughts that are too inconsequential to merit a stand-alone article or post.  For precisely that reason, it is unsurprising that Twitter has become a huge hit among our media stars, for whom triviality is a guiding principle.

But, pre-Twitter, did we really have a shortage of venues devoted to petty musings?   I’d say the opposite is true.

That said, I have found one really useful thing that Twitter does and that I don’t think has ever before been possible: It gives you breaking news in real time before any other online outlet can get to it. Perhaps the best and most recent example was last Tuesday when Apple announced the details of iPhone OS 3.0. If we had to wait until traditional news outlets reported on it, we would have known nothing until several hours after the event. Of course, a few sites were “live blogging” the event, meaning they had people there and they were posting updates every five minutes or so to their blogs. That’s pretty helpful and close to what twitter can do. Still, the people there who were *twittering* the event were able to update continuously and twitter was able to aggregate all the updates and conversation about them into one stream that was easy to refresh and follow. All you had to do was search for the #iphone hashtag.

So twitter is really good at one thing: Breaking news. I’ve also followed a fire in Bozeman and the Tour of California bike race. If you know something is happening but can’t find much about it online, on tv, or elsewhere, try twitter. You just might find it exactly what you were looking for.