cell phones

The Web is abuzz with the role of Twitter (which I wrote about last week) in spreading news about the China earthquake. A reminder and an update: Twitter is the site where users post messages of no more than 140 characters to say what they're doing at any certain moment. This is kind of... limited, and users of Twitter are coming up with other applications. But yesterday, the first news about the earthquake in Sichuan were made known to the world not through CNN or BBC, but through Twitter, when Robert Scoble started reporting accounts from residents in China just as the earthquake was happening. He was ahead of even the USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) by three minutes.  Does this mean Twitter has "come of age" and proved itself to fill a niche that other media can't?

One morning two weeks ago I learned that, three floors above me, World Bank President Bob Zoellick was in animated teleconference with superstar Shakira on education issues (Shakira heads her own foundation called Pies Descalzos --Barefoot). I got the news via the Twitter feed of 10 Downing St., since Gordon Brown was the third party in that conversation. I’ll admit it right away: I don’t get Twitter, the site that encourages you to post what you’re doing at any moment in 140 characters or fewer. Don’t see what’s the point. The only couple of feeds I’ve been interested in following are parodies of well-known characters, including the King of Spain (for English speakers, an example would be the twits from the Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke). But I got intrigued when I saw Serious Institutions and People like the British PM using it and started wondering if there may actually be a point in getting the Bank to join.

Still unsure. You tell me what you think. This is what I’ve found so far: