Last week was another great example of the power of Twitter. The news that an US Airways plane crashed into the Hudson river was first covered by a tweet. On one of the first rescue boats stood Janis Krums, he shot a picture and sent it via Twitpic. His tweet said:

“http://twitpic.com/135xa- There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.”

As the news story developed, about “two new tweets (with the word “plane” in it) every 10 seconds came in. Within minutes that went up to 200 to 400 Tweets every few seconds. There were tons of first-person accounts too.” Via

This wasn’t the first time that Twitter had beaten the old media. It happened with the Mumbai attack (the tweets were later on combined within Google Maps which gave an interesting overview on the bombings) and with another plane crash as well.

Interesting to see is that earlier this week Jaiku, a competitor of Twitter and owned by Google, announced that it wouldn’t continue the development of their service, but that it would go open source. This offers great new opportunities according to founder Jyri Engeström:

“Soon, anyone, for free and with little effort, will be able to install and modify the Jaiku code, launch it on App Engine, and run their own microblogging platform… and what we’re seeing here is the accelerating trend away from microblogging being a destination to microblogging being a pervasive and ubiquitous part of the fabric of the web itself.“

Combine this with the fact that Yahoo BOSS engineer Vik Singh created a Twitter-Yahoo mashup called TweetNews and we can see the future of news. Micro-blogging platforms can be used to track down breaking news stories. Combine this with professional journalism and we have got the perfect new media company!

Sander Duivestein

Tags: twitter
Posted in Me the Media - What's Your Story?

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