This week we see how Twitter becomes CNN newsgathering and distribution tool when everything else gone dark. Twitter is probably mentioned every two minutes on CNN. Because the world relies on Twitter to report what was going on in Iran, Twitter had decided to push off its scheduled maintenance Tuesday morning as the conflict continued. As it happened, Twitter was a major if not sole source of information coming out of Iran. In order to keep the flow of communication to the outside world flowing, Twitter said it would not turn off its service until Iran calmed down. We under estimate how powerful this micro blogging tool can be.
On the flip side, there’s no control over how people use Twitter. There’s always a danger when totalitarian government or organization can abuse it with maliciously intent to deliberately spread misinformation and cause widespread panic. How can we prevent that form happening? There will be more and more situations that we can only reply on Twitter for information, and we'd better figure out ways in which we can authenticate information. Twitter's 140-character-only environment makes it even easier to mislead people, as it's very hard to make a decent argument in 140 characters. There is a very high risk of information being misinterpreted. Then there is confusion over authorship and questions around where the original sources are from. How do we deal with reposting is another challenge.
In additional to causing a revolution with citizen journalism, Twitter can potentially revolutionalize gaming. Soon someone will develop the first ever Twitter-based game. The gaming experience will be very different from motion and graphic games, it will be text-based and may involve secret codes and broadcasting messages to a larger crowd to mobilize the underground forces in Iran or maintain an intelligent dialogue with a mainframe computer controlling missiles in North Korea etc. Not sure how to categorize games like this. Or if they already exist?
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