Do you have to be a twat to Twitter?
Iranian cyber-terrorists targeted Twitter just a few days before Christmas, briefly bringing the social networking website to its knees. Surely it wasn't because they objected to some cretin telling the world what he ate for breakfast or Britney Spears blithering about her "awesome new video", as often happens on Twitter?
More likely the hacking was attempted retribution for Twitter's role in democratic protests surrounding the disputed Iranian presidential election in June.
It's an incredible ascent for a site that was largely unknown outside the digerati at the beginning of the year and still holds a reputation as a fount of useless information. Now Twitter messages -- known as tweets and no more than 140 characters in length -- straddle everything from product marketing to deep political discourse, to, yes, utterly banal observations about someone's morning coffee.
The service was conceived in 2006 as a form of group texting with which friends could tell each other where they were and what they were doing -- using mobile phones or its website. Yet Twitter stubbornly remained anything but an overnight success for more than two years.
Then something strange happened. After months of modest growth that brought its user base to about three million, Twitter doubled in popularity within months in late 2008 and early 2009.
Perhaps the tipping point had been Barack Obama's election campaign that made canny use of social networking sites to reach voters.
But it was undoubtedly helped by celebrities piling on to Twitter as they realised they could converse directly with their public without the filter of the pesky media. Sadly for the celebs, this peek into their world has let us know most of them lead lives frequently as mundane as our own.
In the last month, for example, Britney Spears revealed her love for frozen yoghurt while Paris Hilton admitted to being confused by TV series Lost.
For all the airheads compulsively sharing drivel, though, the counterweight is thousands of funny/informative tweeters -- whether famous or unknown. Try comedian Peter Serafinowicz and his nightly joke sessions. Or Father Ted writer Graham Linehan and his stream of quirky links.
Nonetheless, a US study in August concluded that 40pc of Twitter's content was "pointless babble".
Increasingly, it's Twitter's role in the media that has fuelled its growth to a community estimated at 50 million people. News now takes minutes rather than hours or days to zip around the world. The first picture of the plane crash on New York's Hudson River in January appeared from a tweeter going to the rescue long before press photographers made it to the scene.
During the Iranian election protests, Twitter played a crucial part in enabling the opposition to circumvent censorship and organise street marches while allowing the outside world to eavesdrop on the turmoil.
The irony is that for all its success -- with millions of followers hanging on every tweet of popular celebs such as Stephen Fry and P Diddy, and with companies such as Dell selling computers via Twitter -- it earns virtually no money. Ads or corporate fees will be the most likely revenue sources.
But cautious of strangling the goose that may lay the golden egg, the founders are painfully aware that charging users would just drive them elsewhere to the next big thing. In the meantime, Twitter remains at the heart of the world's biggest conversation.
- Ronan Price
Irish Independent
