Lately, the nightly news has become hard to distinguish from a Twitter account. From members of Congress tweeting during President Obama’s State of the Union address in February to tweets from Tehran, the media is captivated with the immediacy of Twitter.
Social networking sites have impacted the spread of news before, but never like this.
When UT student Ashley Zapata moved out of her apartment last week after UT football player Sergio Kindle drove his car into it, she tweeted about the accident but declined to make a comment. We at The Daily Texan were left pondering if Twitter is legitimate as a credible news source, a way to spread news, or even a simple social tool.
When The Christian-Science Monitor reported yesterday CNN is being criticized for quoting tweets in news articles and attributing them to various sources, it became obvious that journalists worldwide must determine how best to cope with Twitter.
In January, I found out my friend had a Twitter account. He tweeted all through my 21st birthday party, and I mocked him mercilessly for it. One month later, he talked me into using Twitter during my campaign for editor of this paper. I now have a grand total of 47 followers and 23 updates.
I concede that my friend was on the front end of a Twitter revolution. In the five months since he talked me into an account, everyone with any kind of fame, and most people without it, have taken up tweeting. News sources can’t get enough of it. A Google news search for Twitter returns 111,000 results from the past week including a tweet faking Britney Spears’ death and a poignant message from Billy Mayes’ son.
But as the hacking of Spears’ page proves, Twitter is not a legitimate news source. It is a good place for journalists to pick up information they should later verify. Twitter can never replace news because, though tweets are immediate and personal, they cannot possibly contain the multiple sources, background and depth of a news article.
In fact, most of the tweets I read come from legitimate news sources. On the rare occasion I check my Twitter account, I find myself skimming over mundane updates about the lives of my friends and acquaintances to get a quick update on the news from CNN and The Daily Texan. While my friends are great, I simply don’t need to know when they go for a run or eat a sandwich. I rarely post my own updates because I just don’t believe anyone cares that much about my personal life.
Twitter is a great way to disseminate news. It is the fastest way to break a story. But it is not a legitimate source for journalists, and it is a terrible social tool. Once it settles into its ideal role as a conglomeration of breaking news from around the world, Twitter will change media in a drastic way. Until then, I will continue to check my account once a week.
— Jillian Sheridan
The initial idea sounded utterly pointless: update the state of your life in 140 characters or less. Admittedly, technological advances have a tendency of seeming like a generation’s worst attempt at moving the human race forward. And there was no reason to believe that Twitter was any different half a year ago.
Without a doubt, the idea of Twitter — concise, dense and narcissistic — is a product of our time. After all, can you imagine Paul Revere tweeting that the British were coming?
For all of its seemingly pointless uses, Twitter has clearly been a tool against tyranny following the disputed results in Iran’s recent presidential election. At their cores, social movements are based on speaking truth to power, which is done by exposing injustices and drawing public attention to such abuses.
Twitter allowed this in Iran, when every other avenue was cut off.
Suddenly, what was once an expendable pop-culture foible of teens caught the eyes of renowned journalists and government agencies.
Two weeks ago yesterday, it was revealed that the U.S. State Department had clandestinely asked Twitter to postpone a scheduled maintenance that would have shut down the site during peak Iran protest hours.
Newsweek.com created a “Twitter timeline” to compile Iran’s “most noteworthy events, as told through tweets.”
Social networking media, as Twitter and its brethren have been dubbed, has garnered a bad rap over the past year — and for good reason. When CNN and Ashton Kutcher are racing to see whose Twitter can get 1 million followers first, social networking begins to lose its glow.
But through all of this, one simple truth remains: We see the true use of a tool we initially deem mindless when everything else fails us. When reliable Twitter users were the sole inside source for international reporters who were kicked out of Iran when the protests started to intensify, we immediately began to see its necessity.
Simply put, Twitter has given the term “digital democracy” an entirely new meaning.
— Roberto Cervantes
Twitter’s recent explosion in popularity has investors grinning past their ears.
In fact, thanks to the boom in users, the social networking device is worth anywhere between $700 million and $1.7 billion, fourth to Bebo, MySpace and Facebook, according to a social network valuation model by TechCrunch.com.
But while Twitter may currently pride itself on redefining the way users interact with their contacts and followers, the financial longevity of such a limited social service is grim. After all, tweets, nothing more than glorified mass texts, can only hold users’ interests so long.
If Twitter wishes to compete financially with the likes of MySpace and Facebook — multi-billion dollar blogosphere juggernauts — it must adapt and expand to the point that it is, well, just like them.
So far, Twitter has added the ability to share pictures via TwitPic. To hold user and advertiser interest, it will need to add server space for blogs, videos, and other forms of social media. And the only way to sustain those costs is to completely change what Twitter is today.
Just look at Bebo. Though it is relatively unknown in the U.S., the value of the AOL-owned social networking site is worth as much as twice that of Twitter. This is due to Bebo’s functionality and ability to streamline each of a user’s social networking profiles.
Twitter has one unique marketing advantage in that it may be able to sell the most-followed users tweets for advertising. But such a gimmick would alienate and turn off many followers.
In current technological trends, social networks come and go, often in correspondence with our generation’s progression. From Xanga to MySpace to Facebook to Twitter to Bebo, technologically savvy users move down the line of social networks, always looking for the newest and most user-friendly network to kill time on.
While other sites still exist — though sometimes in relative obscurity, like Xanga — Twitter’s currently limited functionality will make it the first site to face the ultimate adapt-or-die scenario.
— Jeremy Burchard
Be the first to comment on this article!