As I mentioned, yesterday, I gave an over-the-phone eyewitness interview for the local ABC news channel. How did that happen?
It’s because I was on twitter and tweeted about the accident on the San Mateo Bridge as we were going across, and was one of the first people (on Twitter, at least) to note that a boat seemed to be hitting the side of the bridge.
Someone on the local news team who was monitoring Twitter replied to me and opened up a dialogue about the boat. I called their news desk and they quickly patched me onto the air to do a quick little bit about what I had seen.
Sure, I wasn’t the most reliable witness (I had seen it quickly out the car window as we passed by on the opposite side of the bridge), but with the high winds yesterday, news teams were not able to get helicopters into the air to get video footage.
Regardless, what a brave new world we live in, where everyone with a phone is an amateur journalist. Yesterday was the perfect example of Twitter being a great resource for immediate information. I was able to search Twitter for “San Mateo Bridge” on my phone and get instant up-to-the-minute updates on what real people were seeing and experiencing in terms of traffic and the accident.
Since Twitter has kind of exploded in popularity over the past year or so, I’ve heard Twitter backlash from various places – friends and comments on blogs and message boards, mainly – that argues that the service is silly and useless.
While I think that Twitter can be used in a silly and useless way (much like most new social networks and ways to communicate, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and text messaging), I think it’s actually a more powerful messaging service than most people realize.
Because it’s so simple (all messages are short and public and easily searchable), it provides an infrastructure for a wide variety of uses. And the biggest plus? It’s all opt-in and anything that I want to ignore is only, at most 140 characters long.
I think, in the end, Twitter’s greatest asset is that it is immediate and can be, at least more than other social networks, quite personal.
And being able to claim that you know Greg Grunberg’s innermost thoughts. Or at least that he helped create an iPhone app called Yowza! (The exclamation point is part of the name of the app, not genuine excitement on my part.)