Two Big Things for Twitter This Week (Not Counting the virus last weekend)
Well…sighs…it finally happened. One of Oprah’s researchers told her about Twitter and how it’s kind of a neat idea. The one consolation that I have is that she’s actually late on this one in that everyone else is in on this before she was.
The second thing is #AmazonFail. For those of you who haven’t heard about this or the associated news story, an author of a book about an adolescent homosexual relationship had noticed that his book was not included in the amazon ranking of most purchased books. On his inquiry with Amazon, he learned that his book had been flagged as adult content and that it therefore the book wasn’t counted in the rankings. This could have been considered an isolated case of misunderstanding but on further analysis many more books were labelled as adult-oriented that had gay themes. This resulted in a twitter storm tagged #amazonfail. Amazon has taken a pretty big PR hit and is continuing to do so. Whether it was intentional (in which case, in my opinion, there are hundreds of other websites for me to take my business to) or unintentional (in which case, they need some developers that are not quite so ham-fisted in their cataloging design capabilities), Amazon was forced to respond rather aggressively to something that originated in a prior to a month ago unheard of web app.
Do I think the world has changed? No. Not materially so. What may have changed is the speed at which people get information. Before now, we had to wait until a blogger created a 500-word essay or Drudge got the news up on his site before we could be outraged by the day’s outrages. If someone posts a lie on twitter now (who on Earth would do such a thing?), the Truth is now not even able to get it’s socks on before the lie makes it around the world, much less his shoes.
What may be slightly world-changing is that this is the first time that “the world” (let’s call it that but really there are still only probably around 4 or 5 million users or so…too many for the fail whale to deal with) had a single platform to voice an opinion about a topic. Sure, there are dozens of websites and blogs out there where people can posts blogs and then have people comment on them, just like this site but this is a consolidated locale where people can get together and publish content about whatever topic they care about and decide on where they get their information from (by following people or keeping track of the twitter feed.) In that regard, it is rather world changing. Maybe the popularity of Twitter due to Oprah’s newfound interest in the site is a good thing, since it will put more voices in the wild to focus on some of the nightmarish problems that are facing us right now.
By the way: “@mtthornton was here before @oprah http://herebeforeoprah.com #herebeforeoprah”