Institute For The Future

Twitter makes itself useful

Rather, the people of San Francisco trying to get a glimpse of the Olympic Torch on Wednesday made Twitter useful. With the officials faking out everyone by throwing the torch on a bus and driving it to Van Ness to start an alternate route, connected citizens began to "tweet" the torch's whereabouts, whether rumors overheard on the street or information from traditional news media. Olympic Torch SF organized the Twitter profile for the event, and all of the tweets can be viewed at SFTorch.

 

Some were wild assumptions, some were accurate to-the-minute updates, and some were just offhand remarks about the entire situation. But overall, they did a great job of tracking the torch as it moved through the city while everyone sat at Embarcadero scratching their heads trying to figure out what was going on.

 

This is the first use of Twitter for a big event that didn't make me roll my eyes, not even just a little.