Two a bit years ago I remember having a conversation with a colleague about whether Twitter was going to become a significant news source. The debate was sparked by blogging guru Robert Scoble who had suggested that in the future people would go to the micro blogging site for news before they turned to mainstream media organisations.
I remember saying something suitably sniffy like ‘can’t see Twitter taking on the BBC just yet.’ However as time has gone by I can see that Scoble was right in his prediction. Like many other Twitter users I often first hear about breaking stories through the site. This might be through friends tipping their followers off about a story or simply by people linking to articles that have just been published in online media.
There are also times when social media in general, and Twitter in particular, move so quickly that media just can’t keep up and a really great example of this was Saturday’s Tsunami in Hawaii.
To begin with social media played a huge role in ensuring that people knew to move to higher ground. Then when they got there the barrage of information coming out of the islands was incredible.
Try as they might CBS News and CNN couldn’t match the content that was spewing out of the island from connected citizens with their webcams, camera phones and tweets. In particular Skype enabled webcams and video streaming services like Qik played a huge role in delivering footage from across Hawaii in places where mainstream media didn’t have cameras.
Twitter was electric too. Once the Tsunami reached Hawaii the islands were buzzing with tweets about which water on which beach was receding and progressing and how the locals were feeling about the impending arrival of walls of water. It was amazing to have all those eyewitness reports even if the actual event was (thank God) not quite the spectacle it could have been.
Ultimately if you wanted to find out what was happening first social media sites, not mainstream media, were the place to be.
