Twitter: your partner in panic facilitation
The vast potential of social networking technologies to aggregate people and effects is something that we’ve been interested in for a while now here at Global Dashboard. In the blue corner: Linux, Wikipedia, anti-FARC protests organised over Facebook. In the red corner: insurgents in Mumbai using Twitter to help them to co-ordinate their attacks.
Well, the last two days have brought another couple of examples. As David noted yesterday, one of them is the current spate of wildcat strikes in the UK, where strikers have been using bulletin board sites like BearFacts and informal text messaging networks.
The other was to be found yesterday on Twitter. As the strikes gathered pace and as heavy snowfall brought much of the UK’s transport system to a standstill, one Twitter user whose updates I subscribe to posted this:
I can confirm that the Co-Op in Forest Hill is out of stock of Heinz Tomato soup #uksnow #blitz #panicbuying
Now, if you’re not familiar with Twitter, then you won’t be aware that the practice of putting ‘#’ in front of a key word is designed to help users to search rapidly for all tweets related to the same topic. So during the Mumbai attacks, for example, you could immediately gather all tweets on the subject simply by searching on #Mumbai.
Image Author: Flickr user ~Molz~
What was interesting to me about this particular tweet was the fact that it was the first on the subject. The user who made the post was not commenting on an existing subject of chatter on Twitter, nor merely observing that tinned soup was moving fast at his local supermarket, but intentionally turning his observation into a new meme designed to spread infectiously.