My guess is that any visitor to this blog has already heard of Twitter
In the unlikely event that you have not, Twitter is a free site that will give you a web page to which you can send text messages from your cell phone. Now why would you want to do that?
Well, you could identify a group of friends and give them access to your web page on twitter and they could see your text messages. If you want to tell your friends where you are and what you are doing, you can just send a text message to twitter. Perhaps only the collegiate and twenty-something set have a need to keep updated on each other’s bar-hopping, but it’s hard to see any other application beyond that. Except for stalking.
What could social studies teachers gain from knowing about twitter? – Probably nothing.
Enter twittervision. This web site combines a world map and feeds from twitter messages uploaded in real time. Take a look and you can see updated “twitters” of what these people are doing and where they are.
This makes this another example of the profit of web-awareness for social studies teachers. twittervision can be the ultimate “breaking news” site. The next time there is a strange smell in New York or any other hint of national disaster or terrorist attack, I will check twittervision first. While we wait for the traditional media to get their act together, hundreds of street level people will be twittering updates of building evacuations, misdirected flights and stopped trains.
Is there a fair chance that twitter (or even technoratti for that matter) is due for a “tipping-point” event like Live 8, when the concerts online practically eclipsed the traditional broadcast. If updated blogs and tools like twittervision become the first source for breaking news it will be more clear than ever that the human race now has a completely new relationship with information.