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Is Twitter useful afterall? - Counterterrorism Blog
The full story (link below) was published by the Counter Terrorism Blog last week. It's a great piece highlighting a few uses of Twitter
We're watching Twitter very closely here at the Fort Bend County OEM, and we even have our own Twitter account set up, mostly for monitoring the "airwaves" and posting occasional site updates, but we also have it set up to Tweet any advisories we post here (like the recent thunderstorm advisory). We also envision it as a nice way for citizen journalists to notify us of something that's happening by including us with an @reply in their tweets, and to contact us via direct message any time they have a question about the office, our policies, or our actions.
Is Twitter useful afterall? - The Counterterrorism Blog (By Roderick Jones)
... [Twitter] has been attracting increasing attention within the mainstream, as the political classes adopt the service most notably, congressman Pete Hokestra (R-Mich.)who produced a stream of tweets detailing his location as he traveled from Andrews Air Force base to Baghdad and back. Besides the disbelieving head shaking this particular series of political tweets attracted, it does highlight the amorphous nature of Twitter -- it isn't clear what it really is.
Certainly, the revenue model remains unclear, as does its true utility or even what the unintended consequences of using the service may be. In a National Security sense Twitter emerged as a powerful networked communications platform during the Mumbai terrorist attacks, when a stream of tweets marked #Mumbai (# being the global tagging system Twitter employs) gave a seemingly real-time commentary on events as they unfolded in Mumbai. Similarly, Twitter has been used to communicate the message and activity surrounding the riots in Greece using the #Griot tag. These are examples of the network effect working with a rapid communications platform and developing a powerful narrative from many different observation points. The style is anarchic but increasingly compelling.
Therefore, one argument regarding the long-term use of Twitter, in the National Security space at least, is that Twitter in conjunction with other tools, continues the trend of making ordinary citizens active producers of potentially actionable intelligence. This equally applies to Microsoft Photosynth and the meshing of user created digital platforms is a future trend, which doesn't seem too far away. One of Twitters more recent high profile moments was the picture of the USAirways plane in the Hudson taken by an ordinary citizen who happened to be on a ferry, which went to the scene. This picture quickly and succinctly explained the situation to any emergency service in the area. This same principal can clearly be globally extended in terms of data and geographic reach. In fact it is the increasing penetration of mobile devices, which would seem to offer a bright future for the Twitter platform.
Read the full story by Roderick Jones: Is Twitter useful afterall? - The Counterterrorism Blog
If you're just getting started on Twitter, or want to learn more, read this excellent Newbies guide to Twitter.
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