When Twitter Becomes Your First Instinct
December 22, 2008 by Colleen Coplick
Filed under Social Media
On December 20th, a Continental flight slid off the runway mid-take off. There were some minor injuries, and of course, the whole thing made the news.
What’s different about this crash however, was the fact that Mike Wilson live-tweeted the whole thing.
Wilson has since been interviewed on several mainstream media stations including NBC, Fox News, and more. A Google search for “denver plane crash + Twitter” yielded more than 22,000 results.
It looks to me like 2008 was the year that Twitter started to go mainstream. It’s becomming the go-to for many for breaking news – the Denver crash was reported on Twitter before it hit mainstream news. Same goes for that F18 that crashed into a San Diego backyard a while back.
Personally, I find this fascinating. It used to be that we learned about the actual news from television news or the newspaper the next morning. Now we can get a play-by-play of events as they unfold. Usually, by the time mainstream news gets ahold of the stories, most of Twitter has already heard about it.
I’m wondering how this will change mainstream news reporting in the upcoming year. Thoughts?
(image source 2DrinksBack’s twitter stream: Twitter)
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Check out what others are saying about this post...[...] out Colleen’s take on this story over at Buzz Networker. Makes you wonder if there really is such a thing as an “instinct” for [...]
[...] for this tool though, and we’re probably only beginning to see how Twitter will eventually become more mainstream. Instinctual? [...]