140Char

Since the tragic events in Mumbai, there has been a lot of coverage of the role of Twitter in breaking news, with both advocates and critics referring to the speed of microblogging in providing updates but raising some questions about validity and honesty.

But to be fair, Mainstream Media (MSM) has been increasingly paying attention to Twitter over the last few months:

• LA Times: SoCal earthquake has everyone a-Twitter
• The Rocky Mountain News twittered from a funeral When Twitter goes bad: newspaper tweets a funeral
• Newspapers that Twitter – October Figures (Ignore the strange header message on the blog at the moment!)
• CNN incorporates Twitter into live shows, e.g. with Rick Sanchez (@ricksanchezcnn)
• CNN and the BBC both refer to Twitter for updates on Mumbai.

There are plenty more examples around, so it’s almost incredible that a mainstream UK publication can still create something quite so inept:

Is Twitter the new Facebook?

You can hear millions screaming in pain as they collectively answer ThisisLondon – ‘No, you buffoon’.

12 negative comments have already been posted, including mine. Sadly they edited out the link to www.140char.com, and others have had comments edited, with no public acknowledgement. Tech journalist Kate Bevan (@katebevan) has also been expressing her disapointment on Twitter, and having her comments edited. Also got negative comments from Amanda Rose (@amandita), who has researched Twitter extensively for academia (including interviewing yours truly!).

I’m not sure it’s worth the energy to deconstruct all the disasters yet again, so here’s my brief comments:

• Badly researched, angled and written.

• It’s 140 characters on Twitter, not 160.
• Barack and Britney are manned by PR people, unlike real celebs ranging from Stephen Fry to Shaquille O’Neal.
• The latest figures show about 5 million users per month.
• The ‘brevity breeds banality’ issue has been debated, disproved and forgotten for months – brevity can lead to impact or banality depending on the person and content.
• Twitter started becoming a news source with events like the UK, LA and Chinese earthquakes, and LA forest fires.
• The ‘gimmick’ isn’t following people – the ‘gimmick’ is interacting with people via the reply functionality.

And there’s more. From the article:

‘after several false starts (“Error on page!”) I manage to log on to MoodyShell’s feed. “I hate it when I burn the roof of my mouth and then it starts to peel. Ew!” she says. Fascinating. Another click, and I am officially “following” her. It feels queasy and wrong.’

No wonder it feels wrong, when @nickcurtis hasn’t managed to follow anyone, and has only managed a solitary tweet. You’d also think if you’re posting something about Twitter, it might be worth popping back to check the response? Maybe it would make for a better article?

Maybe someone should point him to the appropriate Twitter search. Or just pointed him to all the similar articles from 18 months ago that were at least defensible by the fact that it was a new service with an initial familiarity hump to get other – everyone struggles with Twitter the first time they log in, and it’s only when they return and start following and using @replies it becomes an essential tool for research,interaction,news gathering, customer service and more.

As an Englishman (albeit one with a degree in American Studies), I’ve followed the U.S presidential nominations with a fairly casual interest, and with a slight leaning towards one candidate, but not enough that I’m going to talk about it.

Instead, I’m going to proclaim this the ‘Twitter Election’, and the sign of how news and reporting is changing for the better. First up is Twitter’s own Election 2008. It’s fascinating to watch the opinions and messages appearing every second, although the fact that it seems to be based around the keywords of candidates names means I’m tempted to tweet about McCain oven chips and see if it appears!

What’s interesting is how public service broadcaster C-Span has integrated Twitter, Blog coverage, Video, a Debate timeline and a keyword list into the ‘Debate Hub‘. It’s a great example of how ‘aggregation of sources of information provides a starting point for a media company to add it’s own expertise and reason to provide something of value.‘ Sorry, thought that sentence was worth highlighting, although other people have been saying the same thing for a while.

I’ve talked in the past about Twitter providing a news mechanism that trumps mainstream media for events like earthquakes. And I’ve taken a look at what mainstream media needed to do to utilise the new tools available or become increasing irrelevant.

But events like the death of Heath Ledger, or the various earthquakes around the world had a much more striking effect for those that were on Twitter at the time than for the majority of non-microbloggers waking up hours later and being perfectly happy with the coverage they were broadcast – because they weren’t up at 2am to witness how radically different it could be.

This time, it’s an event which has been flagged up in advance, allowing the word to spread – and it’s increasingly being adopted by various mainstream media sources to a greater or lesser extent, allowing far more people to see the benefits of microblogging over traditional coverage.

And I predict we’ll see more and more of this in the coming months, even with controversies like the decision from an U.S. newspaper and website to Twitter live from a child’s funeral. Whether or not it was the correct way to treat that particular situation at the current time, it’s a sign that the boundaries are shifting, and going past simply acknowledging Twitter coverage. And for microblogging to hit the mainstream, the boundaries need to be a long way further down the road than the mass adopters.

I think it’s also the reason for Twitter moving towards grouping, as much as for users. It’s why I was interested in the previously posted quote by Ev Williams, saying that groups are coming. I don’t think it’s necessarily about just Twitter for enterprise as an inward facing tool. I think in Twitter’s case it will also be about groups and tools for outward facing use by companies, which is why they’ve been seemingly slow to respond to Yammer, Present.ly etc.

It’s about raising routes to monetise from enterprise, but also providing the tools to grow the userbase to drive significant revenue. Facebook does OK at 100 million active users per month – Twitter has about 2.5 million registered used. And that mainstream exposure could be the push it needs.