Twitter saved my life!

Ok, it didn’t actually save my life but I definitely felt something change this weekend. I was sitting at home in quiet, decidedly suburban Durbanville when I heard a tremendous bang and the front door shook like it had just been hit by something very heavy. What the bork was that?

I evaluated my sources of news. We listen to the radio but really only in the car. We pick up the M&G most weeks but on a daily basis we read the news online. Neither of these were likely to help since whatever had happened, even if it was important, was going to take time to filter into the news.

Then I thought of twitter. I am not really a twitter user. I have an account and I have a little wordpress plug-in that updates my twitter account whenever I post to my blog but that is about as far as it goes. However, there is a world of people out there obsessed with twitter who “tweet” about everything except their bowel movements, and some don’t stop there.

And now thanks to Twitter search (formerly Summize.com), you can search through the morass of twitter updates. So I typed in “Cape Town” and immediately came up with several “tweets” about the airshow. Ding. Ok, airshow, sonic boom. I get it.

However, that insight was nothing compared to the weird sense of power at being able to dip into the zeitgeist like that. Similar but somehow even more powerful than the feeling I got when I began watching the del.icio.us/popular feed. I don’t think Twitter is going to replace RSS feeds any time soon. It is a powerful complement to blogging and RSS feeds though. Another tool which shortens the synapses between human beings. Particularly for live events. Twittering at conferences is great because you know in very short order when you are missing out on something.

It is easy to get lost in the sea of tweets, feeds and blogs out there, and we certainly haven’t sufficiently refined the tools for managing all this extra connectedness. But it definitely opens up new possibilities.