Twitter Tuesday: Twitter for Mac lets you tweet from anywhere in OS X, Tunisian revolution gets tweeted

Hey, Twitter fans! You may remember a debate that sprung up last year about whether Twitter makes an effective tool for social change and grassroots organizing. Well-known author and New Yorker columnist Malcolm Gladwell said no, and Twitter founder Biz Stone wrote a rebuttal defending the service's usefulness to activists.

Well, at least one revolution has now been tweeted. Tunisia, the northernmost country in Africa, has forced out its president and called for a new election. The "Jasmine Revolution," as some are calling it, was tracked live around the world on Twitter. It's never been this easy to follow the events and voices of a large-scale political protest without a news station acting as a middleman. I'd say that's one point to Twitter for changing the way we experience world events.

On the other hand, as Martin Bryant points out at The Next Web Middle East, the real-time nature of Twitter makes it impossible to read everything when the tweets are coming as fast as furious as they were on #sidibouzid, the Tunisian protest hashtag. Also, popular hashtags attract spammers, further muddying the waters. Twitter's speed is a double-edged sword at the moment, so it's probably good that we still have traditional media around to filter the massive firehose of news tweets until there's a smarter user-controlled filtering system.

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Twitter Tuesday: Twitter for Mac lets you tweet from anywhere in OS X, Tunisian revolution gets tweeted originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 18 Jan 2011 16:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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