The Revolution Will Be Twittered

It's 5:30am on the East Coast and I've just been up all night, watching with rapt attention Twitter feeds since 11pm. The media's been inexplicably out of it (see #CNNfail, but CNN isn't the only one), but Twitter's been amazing to watch. There's been a revolution -- who knows if it'll go anywhere, much less be successful -- organizing in front of me. Users in Tehran debating whether meetups are traps (the 12:30pm "Mousavi gathering" ended up being surrounded by special police, with Mousavi nowhere in sight), and coordinating news and rallies. Local students have been sharing paths around tear gas in and out of dorms; what doors to avoid due to waiting unmarked vans on the other side. How to avoid secret police going door-to-door collecting satellite dishes and modems; cell phone service status throughout the city. It's amazing.

Edit: There's one picture that sums it up: http://twitpic.com/7c85l At least she's facing people, not tanks. Hopefully she's still around...

How will Twitter self-organisation fare if the Iranian Revolutionary Guard decides to start shooting?

It's great that the Iranian people can self-organise despite all the attempted censorship of the government, and certainly the free flow of information is a powerful tool in the hands of the people... but guns are powerful tools too.

It's also curious why they did not clamp down on Twitter. After all, the Chinese government had no trouble shutting down Twitter along with all the other tools of communication.

Here's another thought: if things like Twitter are such a powerful agent of change, perhaps there should be a non-profit that exists for the sole purpose of providing rapidly changing and shifting anonymising proxies to people everywhere, to make it so that it is effectively impossible for any government in the world to block something like Twitter.

With all that said, I wish the best of luck to the Iranian people, and I hope they prevail. This is a historic moment, and I hope their victory without bloodshed.

Surely anything that involves the effect of a new technology (Twitter) on major world events is Hacker News. I don't see how anyone could argue against it.

Twitter is different to Radio. In a worse way ::

A radio transmission is a single-point-in-time event. So once you have broadcast, you leave no trace.

Twitter leaves a trail, which can be monitored post-facto by the enemy. Presumably they could sit and wait and list who reads each tweet too.

Twitter readers aren't going to be happy with this.