It's easy to laugh at the nonsense on Twitter, the service that rules the world of microblogging is full of absurdity. Things like: "
FOLLOW ME? Because I’m CUTE =)” (by someone named 84kdoorsopening) are common. In fact we have all seen our share of Twitter tomfoolery, heck we may even have produced some of it ourselves.
Yet the question today is not what's absurd on Twitter, but instead how a service with a message size of only 140 characters had become a useful, and even “necessary” tool of immediate and intense information transmission. Apart from the practical business application – where companies use Twitter to quickly respond to customer queries and feedback - Twitter has also become the go-to service for disaster/news reporting.
Recently, as Japan reverberated from the shock of 8.9 magnitude quake and tsunami (Friday, March 11, 2011) Twitter became the most important medium of information transfer in the country. In fact within half an hour of the quake the number of Tweets coming from Tokyo alone reached 1,200 per minute, i.e. 72,000 Tweets per hour. In a similar manner, the Twitter account created by Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), to notify the populace of power blackouts and radiation leaks at the quake damaged nuclear power plants, amassed 190,000 followers in less than 24 hours!
As the news of the quake and tsunami spread, Twitter users in U.S.A shared the tsunami’s ETA on American shores — before the official government tsunami warning kicked in.
In short the service which has a following of more than 200 million active users has become an integral element of bite-size information transfer across the globe: a bush-bar amongst other social media powers.
