Twitter and the Web of Trust November 23
Something extraordinary happened on November 16, 2008.
At 12:02:32 PM (EST) a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Indonesia. Within seconds, users of the microblogging platform Twitter who were located in the affected area had broadcast text messages describing the event. Minutes later, tens of thousands of users had learned about the earthquake as news fanned out across Twitter’s global web of social networks in the form of web updates, RSS feeds, mobile application alerts, and SMS text messages.
About two hours later the New York Times, CNN, and other news outlets “broke” the story. Granted, it was a weekend. But any observer of how Twitter has changed the dynamics of information sharing can see that the days of large news outlets serving as the de facto source of breaking news are effectively over.
As the currency of the web as a communications tool has shifted from documents and pages to blogs and tweets, the following trends have emerged:
1. The discrete units of web-based communication have gotten smaller.
2. The propagation time of information among social networks has gotten faster.
It’s worth noting that these two trends are related. Smaller chunks of content are easier to consume and lead to faster rates of propagation. Information flow becomes more [...]
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