Away from the chaos on the streets of Ipoh and within the hall of Perak state assembly, a storm of short messages kept coming in, flashing and distributing the latest developments faster and wider than anything imaginable in the past.
Enter Twitter.
This is yet another sign of evolution within the already hyperactive Malaysian Internet community.
Truth be told, Twitter is not new among young techno-savvy Malaysians who are always ahead of the curve. Indeed, Twitter is a phenomenon in the US. In Malaysia itself, online press organizations like The Malaysian Insider, Nut Graph, Malaysiakini and even The Star Online do use Twitter.
Furthermore, its potential has been proven. For instance, in Moldova just weeks ago, Twitter played a crucial role in mobilizing a large successful protest against the Communist Party. In times of confusion as people kept wondering what was going on, Twitter was Mercury in that eastern Europe country.
Despite that, its importance did not impress too many Malaysians. That is, until May 7, 2009.
It started quite early in the morning. News of arrests was coming in but it came in slow through various blogs. Online news portals also were contributing but for them, extraordinary heavy traffic was taking its toll. Bandwidth demand spiked as demand spiked. Everybody wanted the latest news, even when there was none to be told.
People just kept refreshing like how that generation of gamers old enough to play the game Diablo on their computer kept clicking their mouse to whack on those devils running loose in a sprawling dark dungeon complex.
Multiple page reloads by thousands were beginning to frustrate both readers and administrations of portals alike. For bloggers, live blogging too was not enough. At the same time, Google Reader was amazingly relatively quiet when such an important event was unfolding in Ipoh.
For those on the ground, they needed something which they could post very quickly through their mobile application. Blogs just would not do. Forget about other more sophisticated content management systems. Those systems were too bulky.
“There has to be some other way to do this.”
That was probably what many were thinking. And yes, the answer is yes, there is.
Twitter is the way. It was time for live micro-blogging. Just type fewer than 140 characters into the Twitter account through any desktop, laptop or phone and Twitter will do everything else.
On Twitter, updates on Perak were up to the minute. It was more frequent than anything on any website. Those on Twitter were becoming the most well-informed observers of the May 7 fiasco, only next to those on the ground Twittering their tweets away to Twitter.
Oh, in case you were born yesterday, or rather, hundreds of years ago, tweets are Twitter updates. They are much like a post of a blog except shorter and crunchier.
From Twitter, messages were replicated across the Twitter universe, to Facebook, later to the blogosphere and online news portals.
Whatever the online media planned to publish — with the exception of their tweets — was yesterday news. And whatever news the mainstream media plans to print or broadcast was stale bread.
Twitter became more effective on May 7 when even state assemblymen and reporters began to Twitter. Information just flew freely and widely without censorship. At the manner information spread, those in power will really have to think twice about censorship. At one point, it appeared that even Kristie Lu Stout of CNN was following tweets by a reporter from The Edge.
After a while when the sitting in the Perak state assembly was adjourned for a second time by a new de facto Speaker and detained individuals released, those tweets slowed down a bit.
But it is not dead.
Twitter lies silently for the next big event, not unlike the black monolith in Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
First published in The Malaysian Insider on May 9 2009.
errata — the statement on Kristie Lu Stout might be inaccurate. While Stout does follow tweets from The Edge and that the reporter did tweet Stout, I cannot say with absolute certainty that Stout did follow the reporter’s tweets. I thank the reporter for clarifying the matter.
