Will Twitter, YouTube Shape Future of Humanity?

We’re all hearing a lot about how Twitter and YouTube are playing a role in the future of the Middle East. Let’s get a good look at the numbers that back it up so far.

According to social entrepreneurship blogger Nathaniel Whitmore:

2.2 million blog posts have been written about Iran in the past week.

3,000 first-person videos have been uploaded on YouTube

Up to 100,000 messages about Iran are being posted per hour on Twitter.

This is an incredible amount of coverage. It causes me to wonder what these numbers may look like in the future with other movements and revolutions in the world. Some say Twitter is just in its infancy stages. What about Facebook? The Palo Alto company is essentially copying the real-time stream found in Twitter. Facebook also has many times as many users as Twitter. Will Facebook become the dominate form of social media at the vanguard of these revolutions?

By the way, are we going to start to see large numbers of mini revolutions caused or propelled by this type of communication all over our little planet? Will this be the way that the 75% of Americans who want a single payer health care system actually get it in the future? Will we vote someday on Twitter or Facebook?

One Bloody Tweatstream

Oddly enough, I was able to really delve into the Iranian situation for the first time this week, with the help of just one twitter stream.

In my Skype community, one of my friends dropped a link into a conversation: Read more…

Journalists Wonder What’s Better on Twitter - “First” or “Correct”

I just got back from the 140 Conference in New York. I’m enjoying and appreciating the compliments and the comments from friends and colleagues about my talk at the panel there. One of the most recent comments comes from a friend who doesn’t work in the media at all but has certainly consumed her share of news over the years. She had a few good things to say about tweeting as competition between news organizations. Is it more important to be first or to be correct? As a longtime journalist - I know that “correct” is the only response I want to hear. However, I must admit, I am going to try to be “first” as well.

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“That was a good panel you were on. There were some big organizations represented like the NYT. What really stuck in my craw was when you hit on the topic of whether social sites, like Twitter, are a kind of competition for you journalists.

“Maybe I’m old fashioned but I don’t see it as competition. They are a collection of raw and interesting anecdotal stories that can add up to hard news. No scientist would look at anecdotal evidence and write a conclusive paper on it. The data/tweets/whathaveyou must be researched and verified before any conclusion can be made.

“As the moderator said, it is better to be correct than first. Because of the immediacy and quantity of info on social media sites it can seem tempting to claim some victory on reporting “first” but most people do not get their news from such streams. We watch the nightly news, go to a NYT or CNN website, or read the paper. Read more…