As someone who’s obsessed with keeping up with the latest news, I was interested to see that there’s been a lot of discussion this week following the earthquake in China about the ability of Twitter to revolutionise the way of reporting major news in real-time. (For those of you who aren’t aware of Twitter, check out www.twitter.com for more information and to sign up).
The main focus of the chatter is that Twitter was able to break the news about the earthquake from people on the ground long before major news outlets were reporting it. Popular blogger Scoble was influential in getting the news out – see here for his account on how it went down.
The interesting thing about this from my point of view is how Twitter might change how we find out about major events and the impact this will have on traditional news outlets. BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones wonders “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”.
With publicity like this, and with the recent news that even Downing St has started twittering, it will be interesting to see if Twitter will finally move from being something for the tech-savvy and move to being a tool for consumers to use to keep up-to-date on the latest happenings around the world. I know that the recent events have made me sign-up and start following some influential Twitterers, but has it persuaded you?
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