Twitter comes of age, according to Aussie journos

In my latest edition of The Walkley Magazine, there’s a short piece about Twitter.

May might go down in new media history as the month that Twitter came of age. Twitter, which is an application that allows users to send targeted text messages of up to 140 characters to a network of “followers”, has been the subject of some debate, even amongst early adopters who hadn’t figured out what use it could be put to. However, Robert Scoble. perhaps the world’s leading Twit who claims to get a “tweet” every second of the day, claims he was getting messages about the Chinese earthquake from people in the region well before the news had broken in the mainstream media, and even before the United States geological Survey, which provides early warnings of seismic events. Within minutes Twitter was providing links to images, even video. “Breathing normal again. Feeling an earthquake on the 31st floor was not fun,” twittered one user from an office block in Shanghai. Says Scoble, who was watching his Twitter account on Google News: “it’s amazing the kind of news you can learn by being on Twitter and the connections you can make among people across the world.”