Amazon

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.

NDN is excited to invite you to a very special event on Thursday, March 19, for our two newest Fellows, Morley Winograd and Mike Hais, co-authors of the critically acclaimed Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, & the Future of American Politics, a prophetic book that foresaw how the Millennial Generation, America's newest civic generation, and the new technologies they use so well, would change politics forever.  

Morley and Mike will be at NDN to celebrate the release of the new, updated paperback edition of Millennial Makeover, which includes an exclusive afterword on the historic 2008 elections. Rutgers University Press is officially releasing the book this Sunday, March 15; the NDN forum with the authors in Washington, DC, will be the first official stop on their book tour.

As Morley and Mike wrote in the introduction to their critically acclaimed 2008 book: 

"Each of the five major political realignments in U.S. history has been triggered by a crucial event, such as the Civil War or the Great Depression that then became the subject of extensive examination. But the real driving forces behind this constant and predictable shift in the fortunes of America's political parties and in its political institutions and public policies are underlying changes in generational size and attitudes and contemporaneous advances in communication technologies."

The rest, as they say, is history. Texting, Twittering, social networking Millennials voted for Barack Obama by a more than 2:1 margin, and with tens of millions more Millennials becoming eligible to vote in 2010 and 2012, the GOP could become marginalized for decades to come if they fail to connect with this generation -- the largest American generation ever and a strong replica of the last civic generation, the GI Generation

The special forum with Morley and Mike will start at 12 p.m. Lunch will be served beginning at 11:30 a.m. Seating is limited, so please arrive early to ensure a spot. To RSVP, click here. For more information, including speaker bios and event location, please click here.

For those not able to attend the event here in our offices, be sure to watch it live on our new high-end Webcasting system at www.ndnblog.org/livecast at 12:15 p.m. ET.

In the meantime, if you haven't read the new Millennial Makeover yet, you can buy it here. New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winner critic Michiko Kakutani chose the original book as one of her 10 favorites in 2008, and the new afterword only makes the book even more interesting. Whether you're in DC or around the globe, we look forward to your joining us on March 19.