Tweeting the terror: How social media reacted to Mumbai

The minute news broke of the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, India, social media sites like Twitter were inundated with a huge volume of messages. CNN reports.

With more than 6 million members worldwide, an estimated 80 messages, or "tweets," were being sent to Twitter.com via SMS every five seconds, providing eyewitness accounts and updates.

Many Twitter users also sent pleas for blood donors to make their way to specific hospitals in Mumbai where doctors were faced with low stocks and rising casualties.

Others sent information about helplines and contact numbers for those who had friends and relatives caught up in the attacks. Tweeters were also mobilized to help with transcribing a list of the dead and injured from hospitals, which were quickly posted online.

Picture from the BBC

Twitter kills Canadian SMS updates. Can the U.S. be far behind?

Twitter is ending outbound SMS updates in Canada. In their own words:

Unexpected changes in our billing have forced us into a difficult situation with our Canadian SMS service. We can’t afford to support this service given our current arrangement with our providers (where costs have been doubling for the past several months.) As a result, effective today we are no longer delivering outbound SMS over our Canadian shortcode (21212).

According to Venture Beat, now the U.S. and India remain as the only countries with full SMS support for Twitter.

Too many twitters drown out Rudd website

So many people were signing up to follow Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's short text message updates on Twitter last night that his new page on the social networking site crashed.

[via The Sydney Morning Herald]

Previously: - Australian Prime Minister joins Twitter

Australian Prime Minister joins Twitter

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has joined Twitter.

The Prime Minister’s Twitter account, presumably updated by staff comes as part of the launch of the KevinPM site, a tame take on the Obama campaign’s social media outreach during the US Presidential Election.

[via Inquistr]

Celebrities Fighting Back Against Fake Twitter Profiles

Twitter, while fun and useful, has become a breeding ground for hacks who dream of becoming the next Fake Steve Jobs. Lance Armstrong, Britney Spears, and Al Gore have all recently joined the microblogging service and have had to reclaim their online identities.

[via Switched]

‘Water me’ alerts from your plants via Twitter to your cell phone

Spotted on Red Ferret, the Botanicalls Kit that offers ‘water me’ alerts from your plants via online Twitter status updates to your mobile phone.

twittervotereport.com

World Changing reports on twittervotereport.com which went live last Wednesday, enabling voters across the U.S. to connect with one another in real time via short messages sent various ways: from cell phones, Twitter accounts, or even home phones.

Twittervotereport has offered users a chance to report from the polls:

"The New Black Panther Party using nightsticks to intimidate voters for Obama in Philadelphia".

"Voted in record time today - no wait. seemed like more police at the polls than other years; fine with me".

Read full article.

Politics Never Smelled So Tweet

At midnight Thursday, Twitter launched election.twitter.com, the first specialized section of its site. Like Twitter’s main service, it is dominated by a big white box. But instead of typing an answer to “What are you doing?” the election site asks “What do you think?”

Below that box is a constantly scrolling display of the thoughts (called “tweets” in Twitterspeak) of other Twitter users. These include all the tweets entered on the election page as well as those entered in any other part of the service with obvious election-related phrases, such as “Palin.” Read more...

[The Caucus via Bits Blog - NYTimes]

Current TV to broadcast tweets during debates

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Twitter updates will flash onscreen on Current TV during the upcoming upcoming presidential debates featuring McCain vs. Obama.

"During the debates, the network bent on viewer-created content will broadcast Twitter messages -- or "tweets" -- from viewers. In close to real time, Current will display comments on the screen while John McCain and Barack Obama face off."

[via NewTeeVee]

A shocking misuse of Twitter

In a move that was not only morbid, but called into question by a slew of critics, a Colorado newspaper reporter Twittered a three-year old’s funeral Wednesday after the child died in a car accident earlier in the week. TechCrunch reports.

"In what some are saying is the result of the newspaper’s undying desire to be the first to report on local news, it Twittered the live events at the funeral instead of waiting to report on it after it was over.

... The reporter, Berny Morson, still has his Twitter feed active and the live events of the funeral are still included in his timeline. His coverage of the funeral begins with a description of the casket and mourners filing in and ends when “family members shovel earth into [the] grave.”

How Companies Use Twitter To Bolster Their Brands

A growing number of companies are keeping track of what's said about their brands on Twitter, writes NewsFactor.

"Comcast, Dell Relevant Products/Services, General Motors, H&R Block, Kodak, and Whole Foods Market are among a handful of companies haunting Twitter to do everything from burnish brands to provide customer service.

Twitter is a pioneer of microblogging, a way for users to keep others informed of their current status by way of text messaging, instant messaging, e-mail, or the Web.

The attention to Twitter reflects the power Relevant Products/Services of new social media tools in letting consumers shape public discussion over brands. "The real control of the brand has moved into the customer's hands, and technology has enabled that," says Lane Becker, president of Get Satisfaction.

... It's not just audience size that draws brands. People who use the site are likely to hold sway over others. A single Twitter message -- known informally as a tweet -- sent in frustration over a product or a service's performance can be read by hundreds or thousands of people. Similarly, positive interaction with a representative of the manufacturer or service provider can help change an influencer's perspective for the better."

Brave New World of Digital Intimacy

Clive Thompson's article for The New York Times titled "Brave New World of Digital Intimacy" is a must read.

Thompson describes the experience of using Facebook and Twitter and explores several theories about the impact of continuous sharing of daily details, the incessant online contact - what scientist are calling “ambient awareness.

"... Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley, a 39-year-old documentation specialist for a software firm who lives in Seattle described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life"

... The ultimate effect of the new awareness brings back the dynamics of small-town life, where everybody knows your business.

... Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor — a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties. We now have precisely the opposite problem. Indeed, our modern awareness tools reverse the original conceit of the Internet. When cyberspace came along in the early ’90s, it was celebrated as a place where you could reinvent your identity — become someone new.

“If anything, it’s identity-constraining now,” Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County told me. >“You can’t play with your identity if your audience is always checking up on you."

[via Smart Mobs]

The Twiller. Using Twitter to write a thriller

Matt Richtel for Bits Blog explains wonderfully how he's using Twitter to write a novel.

"... Recently, a handful of creators (present company included) have scrapped pen and paper for mobile phone and keypad, and started texting their novels — in real time, just a few characters at a time. Our medium is Twitter, a service that lets you broadcast bursts of 140 characters at a time to be read by people who subscribe to get your updates.

... The appearance of my story on this new medium has apparently confused some people. But many of my newspaper colleagues write novels. I’ve already published one. This is just an experiment in a new medium.

Plus, it’s a short story with a proverbial long tail — albeit a short, long tail. Only about 400 people are reading the story — a few get added every few days. It’s whatever is the opposite of mass market."

I don’t know if the story will catch much attention, but, then again, it doesn’t require much attention at all."

SMS Costs Clip Twitter´s Wings

Twitter abruptly turns off SMS alerts to users outside USA, Canada and India, reports 160characters.org.

The costs of sending free SMS to subscribers without an obvious business model has finally taken its toll on Twitter and it has turned off text message alerts to everyone outside USA, Canada and India.

Changes for Some SMS Users—Good and Bad News - Twitter Blog

Los Angeles earthquake chokes phone calls, not Twitter

Twittering and texting are the way to go in case of emergency, like Los Angeles' 5.4 earthquake which hit on Tuesday.

According to cnet news, landline and cellular phone networks were heavily congested as callers jammed the lines, creating frustration for some users who had difficulty getting calls through.

"If you're on a wireless network and you can't get a call through, often the texting network won't be as congested," said John Britton, an AT&T spokesman.

He also advised users to forgo making non-emergency calls when natural disasters strike, in order to free up network resources for emergency calls.

The earthquake not only created network congestion for AT&T callers, but for Verizon customers, too. "

Related: - As early as 2003, The CTIA, reminded all Americans in a press release, that text messaging can be a fast, efficient and reliable way to communicate in the event of an emergency. And, if more wireless users rely on text messaging in crisis situations, the people who need to make voice calls the most - emergency responders and 911 callers - can get through more easily.

U.C. Berkeley student's Twitter messages alerted world to his arrest in Egypt

When Egyptian police scooped up UC Berkeley graduate journalism student James Karl Buck, who was photographing a noisy demonstration, and dumped him in a jail cell last week, they didn't count on Twitter. The Mercury News reports.

"Buck, 29, a former Oakland Tribune multimedia intern, used the ubiquitous short messaging service to tap out a single word on his cellular phone: ARRESTED. The message went out to the cell phones and computers of a wide circle of friends in the United States and to the mostly leftist, anti-government bloggers in Egypt who are the subject of his graduate journalism project.

The next day, he walked out a free man with an Egyptian attorney hired by UC Berkeley at his side and the U.S. Embassy on the phone."

Rocketboom Founder Puts His Twitter Account On Sale

How much is a Twitter account with nearly 1,500 followers worth? Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron wants to find out, and launches a publicity stunt that will spark a debate about trust and privacy: He’s selling his Twitter account, including the followers.

Click here for his explanation for the sale.

[TechCrunch via Techmeme]

S.F. almost outwits Olympic torch Twitterat

Switching itineraries threw off hundreds of protesters and put Twitter and text-message alert systems to the test, a city officials in SF decided to take the Olympic torch relay on a far different route Wednesday than had been previously announced.

"We are reorganizing the protest, sending text messages with minute-by-minute updates on where the torches are," said Tawni Tidwell, a member of protest organizer SF Team Tibet. "People are using their cell phones, BlackBerrys, and PDAs. We are also updating media though our phones, sending pictures."

Tidwell added: "It would be really, really hard if we didn't have this. Can you imagine if the protesters in Lhasa had this technology? Witnesses could just send things in."

[via News.com]

SMS Twitter Reporting For The Presidential Elections

Ana Marie Cox of Time.com and Marc Ambinder, a political blogger for The Atlantic, have joined Slate's John Dickerson in using Twitter to report on the US presidential election, reports The New York Times via Moco News.

"Some might consider the idea of a barrage of text-messaged snippets about the presidential election the final dreadful realization of the news media’s obsession with “sound bites.” And spending time with the Twittered campaign reporting can mean wallowing in skin-deep observations, anonymous trashing of candidates and more than you would want to know about the food and travel conditions for the reporting class.

But it is genuine, and at times enlightening, which is more than you can say for the candidates themselves, who have also taken to using Twitter to update their supporters."