For those that don’t know Twitter (www.twitter.com) is a micro-blogging web service that allows users to leave short messages, limited to 140 characters, online for anyone to read.  Each user can follow the “Tweets” of other people and have any user follow them as well.  Many people have asked me what Twitter is all about and I’ve never had a good answer for anyone.  That is until last week.

On Friday, July 3rd I was sitting at my desk at my day job working on some website changes when one of my coworkers called me to say that the credit card payment website was not working.  We use Authorize.net to take credit card payments from our customers and sure enough after thorough troubleshooting I determined that the site was definitely offline.  We tried calling technical support but couldn’t get through.  We searched the web and couldn’t find anything.  The last place I thought to look was Twitter, and what I found was incredible.

A simple search on Twitter for Authorize.net brought up many tweets complaining the site was down but mixed in was a single post mentioning a fire in a plaza near Seattle, WA where Authorize.net has its corporate headquarters and main server facility.  About five minutes into my search the word had spread about the fire taking out the power and then setting off the sprinkler system that in turn shorted out the backup generators and left the entire plaza with no power.  Now this had all been happening since early in the morning yet no major news site, or even the local Seattle new stations, were covering the storing until well into the afternoon.

What this shows is that Twitter is a great place for first hand reporting on news events long before the big media can get to it.  We also saw how powerful Twitter can be during the recent political unrest in Iran when illegal “tweets” where the only way the news was being revealed.  I believe this signals an upcoming change in how and when the public gets the news.

You can follow Argonaut Design on Twitter at @argodesign or my personal account at @jaypbennett.

If you have any questions about Twitter please feel free to email me.