Twitter: It's Not Just What's For Breakfast Anymore

Dan has written extensively about Twitter in his weekly Thursday New Tools feature. From talking to friends or colleagues, my sense is that you either love Twitter or you hate it. There doesn't seem to be a lot of inbetweet.

Last night, I happened upon this recent New York Times article on Twitter, "Putting Twitter's World to Use."  

My first reaction to Twitter was lukewarm: I'm not so interested in a 140-character verbal tweet about what someone is eating for breakfast.

But like many new tools and media, Twitter is evolving. To wit:

According to the article:

Companies like Starbucks, Whole Foods and Dell can see what their customers are thinking as they use a product, and the companies can adapt their marketing accordingly. Last week in Moldova, protesters used Twitter as a rallying tool while outsiders peered at their tweets to help them understand what was happening in that little-known country.

And over the weekend, Amazon.com learned how important it was to respond to the Twitter audience. After one author noticed that Amazon had reclassified books with gay and lesbian themes as “adult” and removed them from the main search and sales rankings, a protest broke out on blogs and Twitter. The company felt compelled to respond despite the Easter holiday, initially saying the problem was due to a “glitch in our system” but later blaming a “ham-fisted cataloging error” that affected more than 57,000 books dealing with health and sex.

Soon, machines could twitter as much as people. Corey Menscher, a graduate student at New York University, developed the Kickbee, an elastic band with vibration sensors that his pregnant wife wore to alert Twitter each time the baby kicked: “I kicked Mommy at 08:52 PM on Fri, Jan 2!” Mr. Menscher is now considering selling the product.

Pairing sensors with Twitter leads some to think Twitter could be used to send home security alerts or tell doctors when a patient’s blood sugar or heart rate climbs too high. In the aggregate, such real-time data streams could aid medical researchers.

Already doctors use Twitter to ask for help and share information about procedures. At Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, surgeons and residents twittered throughout a recent operation to remove a brain tumor from a 47-year-old man who has seizures.

And more:

Indeed, the news-gathering promise of Twitter was most evident during the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last November and when a jetliner landed in the Hudson River in January. People were twittering from the scenes before reporters arrived.

...Even small businesses find Twitter useful. For example, Mary F. Jenn, of True Massage and Wellness in San Francisco, twitters when masseuses have same-day openings in their schedules and offers discounts. The spa is often fully booked within several hours.

But Twitter’s most productive use has been for businesses that want to peer into the minds of their customers, reading their immediate reactions to a product. Dell noticed customers complaining on Twitter that the apostrophe and return keys were too close together on the Dell Mini 9 laptop. So Dell fixed the problem on the Dell Mini 10.

New technologies are fascinating often because of the way people learn to adapt them across so many situations -- twittering in Moldova to come to a protest, Facebooking to organize in Egypt, avoiding crushing fees when sending money home to another contient by doing it on a cell phone. As Simon wrote this morning, the Obama Administration is using mobile technology as it seeks to advance democracy and an open society in Cuba.

And as Tom Kalil wrote for NDN affiliate the New Policy Institute in an enormously compelling paper last year, "...the explosive growth of mobile communications can be a powerful tool for addressing some of the most critical challenges of the 21st century, such as promoting vibrant democracies, fostering inclusive economic growth, and reducing the huge inequities in life expectancy between rich and poor nations."

New tools, new technologies, new opportunities.