2008 Belongs To Twitter, Ya Heard?

Twitter is shaking up the way we do things.  No longer do we wait for an online news site, much less the morning paper.  No more looking on Digg for upcoming stories, or seeing the feed from your favorite blog post.  Twitter is where the latest news is at, and it's as soon after an event occurs as I can see it getting.  Earthquake in California?  Twitter is onto the next story before anyone can write up a blog post.  Who's leading the exit polls in Iowa?  The Twitterverse knows within seconds, while CNN and Fox News are still trying to get a camera on the reporter.

Patrick Ruffini, of Politweets fame, started using Twitter in an experiment after realizing how fast the news spread after a California earthquake.  Ruffini has kept many Twitter users informed about the ongoing election process this year, which I care about, but not enough to seek out the latest news every day.  Because of Twitter, I am more informed.

Twitter wasn't set up for this type of use though.  It wasn't built to withstand the rigors of covering major events.  Ruffini writes:

After Twitter had its big coming out at SXSW 2007, it was kind of a joke. You were supposed to use it to answer the question “What are you doing?” No answer was trivial or mundane enough. Even many of the digerati I knew were slow to jump on the bandwagon, preferring to keep the details of their breakfast that morning to themselves.

But as with most Internet phenomena, users hacked Twitter into something completely different. Now, it’s the first place I turn to if I need a quick question answered, and for raw political intelligence. In a way, it follows in the footsteps of the early blogosphere, which was originally teenage girls blabbing about high school life but really took off as a platform for political discourse.

I registered for Twitter several months ago, but it wasn't until the middle of December that I started to actively use it.  Twitter helps me get quick answers, the latest news, and most importantly, inspiration.  From Ben Tremblay encouraging me to finally start a real blog, to rethinking what kind of job I'd really like to have as I continue my job hunt (thanks Jeremiah Owyang, Jake McKee, and Connie Bensen), to my newfound dreams of my very own startup, which could potentially happen in just a couple of years!  As a youth leader for our area High Schoolers, I enjoy seeing what Evan Courtney and Rhyne Armstrong have to say, and their links can be very uplifting on very down days.  Twitter has revolutionized how I interact online, and has opened up an exciting new world online to me, full of possibilities, great people, and insights I never would have seen otherwise.

While true that Twitter still goes down too easily, as evidenced by the Macworld Keynote and major political debates, the users never leave, diligently checking every few minutes if it is back up yet.  I saw figures somewhere online that Twitter was down for 5 days last year, which means there was still 360 solid days of Tweeting amongst the Twitteratii.  While facing competition from Pownce, still fresh out of beta, Twitter is still faster and easier to use.  Not to say Pownce is hard to use, it just isn't nearly as simple as Twitter is, which is a large part of its allure.  Yes, Twitter is here to stay, like it or not.  From its early purpose to merely tell people what you were doing, to juggernaut of the virality of the internet, Twitter has changed how we do things, and I for one, am a huge beneficiary.

If you're ready to start using Twitter, here's the Twitter profiles for people mentioned in this post:   @PatrickRuffini  @bentrem  @jowyang  @sink  @cbensen  @mufan96  @Ninety7  @thattalldude