By Bonnie James
The open exchange of information can lead to a positive global impact, free social networking and micro-blogging service Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone said yesterday.
“When people are more informed, they become engaged and empathetic to the plight of others and ultimately become global citizens,” he stated at a plenary session of the first World Innovation Summit for Education.
There is a significant shift towards communicating more openly in the last 10 years, pointed out Stone, who helped build other popular social media services Xanga, Blogger, and Odeo.
Twitter (a real-time, one-to-many network that is changing the way people communicate around the world), launched about two years ago, was initially thought of as a rudimentary social networking service, he recalled.
To illustrate the reach of Twitter, which enables its users to send and read messages (of up to 140 characters) known as tweets, Stone narrated a real-life incident.
A student from University of California, Berkeley, US, who went to Cairo, Egypt, got arrested as he was taking pictures of a protest.
Immediately after he was thrown into a police vehicle, the young man managed to send a one-word tweet that just said ‘arrested.’
Immediately his friends back in the US spoke to the university dean, who got in touch with a lawyer, who in turn contacted the consul and two hours later the student tweeted again – ‘freed.’
“With Twitter we created an open model and created a new kind of information network,” Stone asserted.
The reason for adopting the short message format was that there are 4bn active mobile phone accounts in the world, he added. |
