Twitter edges out blogs, Flickr and YouTube survive

Twitter blew apart the blogosphere, as netizens clamoured for information about the Mumbai attacks

When Vinukumar Ranganathan spent about Rs1 lakh on a digital camera and lenses; he never thought it would one day lead to international fame. But thanks to the increasing power of the Internet, even a hobbyist like Vinu has suddenly become the celebrated face of citizen journalism.

"Yesterday, at about 10.30pm, I heard two loud bangs," says the 27-year-old mobile software-builder, who lives next to the Colaba Fire Station in South Mumbai. "I did not pay much heed to it. But my sister was watching the TV and suddenly she said, 'there's shooting at the railway station'. So, I collected my camera and stepped out to investigate."

Vinu did not need to reach the railway station. Almost as soon as he stepped out of his house, he could see debris lying on the road. "Then I realised that the noise I heard were explosions next to the Nariman House," he says. Vinu quickly snapped away, returned home and uploaded all 112 pictures on to the photosharing website, flickr.com. "I have been using Flickr for four years now, and I get about 10 views per photo," he says.

This time, it was different. "By 3am, the first photo I uploaded had already been viewed 40,000 times," he says. By afternoon, his photographs, which were being linked to by mainstream news websites as well, had received 220,000 page views.

Vinu's photographs are not the only evidence of the Internet coming into its own as a news medium. Around 12 hours after the attack, the mass messaging service, Twitter.com, was seeing around 1,500 user-generated updates on the terror-strike every hour, from its users. In other words, 25 users were pasting their opinion, information, or other links, about the attack, every minute.

"All the first information about these events in recent times has been through Twitter," says Vinu, "Whether it was the Bangalore blasts, or the Nobel Prize."

Three-year-old Twitter, projected as a 'micro blogging' site by the tiny firm that runs it, has around six million users. The service works like an instant messenger, but with a 'broadcast' option that allows you to send the same message to all your contacts. As a result, depending on the number of people you have in your contact list, you can end up getting quite a few number of updates every minute.

"Twitter is more live than live TV, the pace of the updates can be quite scary," says blogger, ethnographer, and social media expert, Dina Mehta. Dina, like many in the 'social media' community, believes that Twitter is coming up as the medium of choice when it comes to news dissemination on the Internet, a role that was earlier confined to blogging. "I am finding it a difficult to keep up on the blog. Blog is now for analysis and things to do with specific issues, while the
interactive conversations have moved to Twitter," she points out.

Vinu, a die-hard blogger, who has regularly updated his site for the last three years, agrees: "I am an impulsive blogger. I don't plan what I am going to write. However, these days, Twitter helps me release it faster and easier." He confesses that from 20 blog posts a month, he currently posts only three or four. In contrast, his Twitter page had 50 updates in the
first 18 hours after the shooting.

Another blogger and 'tweeter', Prem Kumar, an IT consultant from Bangalore, points out that Twitter has altered his consumption of news radically. "In India, people are watching TV and putting whatever they see into their Twitter updates. So, even while I am watching one channel, I am also seeing what is there on the others, thanks to Twitter," he points out.
Since Twitter can also be used as an instant messenger (IM), he says, it also adds a level of interactivity to news. "If I want to know more about something, I can simply message the person who posted it back immediately," he says.

It is perhaps little wonder that while photo- and video-sharing sites such as Flickr and YouTube continue to see frequent updates from netizens, the blogosphere has been largely confined to long, first-person accounts, that do not fit the Twitter format.

Gaurav Mishra, a visiting professor at Georgetown University, who studies online social media in developing countries, says such services combine the best of three worlds - broadcast media, blogging and person-to-person instant messaging. "In two to three years, such services will gain a lot of traction in the market," says the professor, who organised India's first 'twitter meet', a year ago. "Though they may not replace mainstream media, they will increasingly become the source of your first information," he says.

e_sreejiraj@dnaindia.net