What I learned from Twitter this week

We’ve all seen on the news how Twitter is being used in Iran and elsewhere for people to share information that governments don’t want shared and in disasters to help inform others of the situation. But over the weekend, it was in some ways “my turn”. The storm (that may or may not have included a tornado) which passed through Edmonton caused all manner of damage was being tweeted about so much that #yeg became a trending topic worldwide… and on a weekend to boot. This might be an artifact of the adoption rate in the city, but it certainly was an experience to be able to get updates about what was happening with the storm in different parts of the city far faster than the traditional news channels were getting it. It will be interesting to see how Twitter will continue to evolve over time, but it is also going to be interesting to see what the next service will be that we don’t know that we need right now. Many people say that it will be some manner of audio/video version of Twitter, but I think that won’t be the case. I think the next version of instant news service will also be text based if only to fit within the limitations of our input devices. We might access this service through augmented reality, but it will be populated and still be accessible via text.