All of a Twitter

I am not sure about Twitter. I was an 'early adopter' many years ago but an 'early adopter' in the same way as you join a Gym just after Christmas - it seemed like a good idea at the time and like that standing order for the gym membership my twitter account just sat there, completely forgotten until just recently.
Twitter was very much under the radar until it was taken up by the media who found it useful as a reporting tool and live news feed into 24 hour rolling news programmes and websites. Today such is its presence that it has become a news form all by itself.
It is undoubtedly an increasingly powerful tool now that it has features such as automatic shortening of urls and speedy ways of retweeting. It sits alongside Facebook and YouTube on nearly all smartphones and will form part of Facebook's new message system together on the same feed as email and text. Yet its place in HE in general and Student Services in particular is illusive. That is until now.
Out of curiosity I started following the twitter feed for the national student protests of Wednesday 24 th November 2010. The volume of tweets was staggering even if some were retweets and if that was not revealing enough it was the use that people we making of the tweets that so impressed. There were links to google maps to show where student occupations where taking place, tweets from students 'kettled' by the police, tweets from the parents of students 'kettled' by the police. People exchanging stories real, imagined or just wished for, about police actions, legal advice on your rights together with phone numbers, the latest news from occupations. Those from Russell Group were in upper and lower case, perfect spelling and even ironic.
And finally with new tweets reaching over 100 in 3 mins and to show that Twitter was here to stay- a tweet from the Met Police in London saying that they were slowly releasing students - but was it really them?

(These are my own views and don't represent AMOSSHE or any other organisation)