All my family members set glued to TV sets to view coverage on the Mumbai attacks, but not me. I found that Twitter worked faster than anything else. For those who don’t know what Twitter is, I’ll tell you about it some other day. Well, it was even reported that TV channels used the hash tag #Mumbai to get scrolling messages for their channels. Telegraph.co.uk says "Mumbai attacks: Twitter and flickr used to break news". Even I found #Mumbai tag on twitter was working really awesome and faster than any other news channels on the main stream. Even at this point of time ( 7:30 A.M. IST ) I can see a lot of tweeters, tweeting live from various places and sharing their experience about the Mumbai incident. Just a couple of seconds ago I got a tweet that another blast has occurred, but there isn’t any such information on TV yet..
Another hash tag #mumbaifamilies was created for people who want to know about their relatives residing in Mumbai. As asked by many of my friends, you too may think that twitter is no way official and may distort the news. To this point, I’ll say that to a wrong tweet, there are hundreds of tweeters to correct them. So I think twitter can be believed and so does some news agencies too. Many tweeters even posted links to their photo stream with a lots of pics of those disastrous scenes. For instance @Vinu put many photos on his flickr stream. I found many social activists too on twitter popping in with tweets about latest happenings there, one among them is @dina who also reported for the CNN International as a citizen reporter.
There were even rumors that Indian govt. is planning either to ban twitter or ask them to block Mumbai related tweets as this may help those terrorist get vital information. But yet with any such official information. If you are also excited to know about the happenings at Mumbai you can check out Mumbai’s hash tag #Mumbai.
Links: #Mumbai | #MumbaiFamilies | List of dead or injured
I always new Twitter ws super useful!
Well its a misconceived perception to think that Twitter is a toll for the masses in India. India exhibits a very different behavior when it comes to the tool’s usage. Around 5000 users in an internet population of 60 million is a very small percentage. I think its a good broadcasting mechanism to the international masses.Also most of the tweets are news picked up from Indian mainstream channels which would anyway experience a lag in reaching international media. For the average internet user in India…he, in all probability wouldn’t have even heard of the tool
@Robin Jacob abraham -
You are right buddy… In India most internet users don’t know about Twitter but due to large population of this country a small percentage of it proves enough to drive a service.
ermm that news was so famous. It must have gone to all parts of internet. So it has arrive in twitter too.
Twitter is very useful and one of the fastest ways to send information. No wonder why other news channels are using Twitter to bring news! Even BBC follows some twitter feeds for latest news.