Twitter is fulfilling its potential

Mar 12 2009 by David Coxon, The Journal

ALMOST a year ago when I wrote my first column for Tech Notes, it was a piece about a little known internet service called Twitter.

A messaging facility that let you communicate with a large group of people at once, Twitter had been around for a couple of years, but I never quite got it. And millions more people were in the same boat as me. Fast-forward to today, though, and much has changed .

Personally I was won over when I went to the Thinking Digital Conference in Gateshead last May, and saw the way that Twitter was being used by delegates to stay in touch during the conference, and to add their experiences to experiences of the speakers.

And in the past few weeks, millions more people have started using the service. No longer the sole preserve of geeks, it’s much more mainstream now, with celebrities such as Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross raising its awareness through TV and radio.

The service is also being used more and more by businesses – by internal teams to communicate with one another, and also to communicate with clients and customers.

But the really big change is the way that Twitter is starting to fulfil its real potential, the potential for harnessing the power of crowds.

During the snowstorms that recently hit the UK, data from the tens of thousands of Twitter users all over the country were collated in real time and fed to a map to provide an arguably more current and accurate view of the weather than even the Met Office was able to provide.

Around the same time came Twestival. Twitter users all over the world organised local events, all happening on the same day and all raising money for a safe water charity. Twestival raised more than a million pounds, which will save many, many lives around the world.

And then we had the “twitchhiker” – a North East-based Twitter user who set out to travel as far as possible around the world (again raising money for charity) on the good will of fellow Twitterers to put him up, feed him and provide transport to help him on his way.

Twitter has huge potential. It is an incredibly useful tool for connecting groups of people, no matter how disparate. And for businesses, it can be a tremendously powerful way of building your brand and selling your wares. Just ask Dell, who’ve shipped more than US$1m of equipment through Twitter alone.

The best thing is that the more users Twitter attracts, the more powerful it becomes.

David Coxon is the IT manager at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art.