The Revolution will be Tweeted

It was just a little less than 8 years ago, when I was frantically surfing the web, trying to get on any news site, trying to get any information. And while occasionally I would be able to get a full story loaded, for the most part, finding out information from the web while 9/11 was happening, was, at best, a near-impossible task.

Not to compare the two events in a sense of loss of tragedy, but when Michael Jackson died a few days ago, the web also came crashing to a halt.

This time though, it was different. Not only were you not able to access website for news, but various Social Networks - which didn't exist in 2001 - also slowed. Twitter, Wikipedia, an even AIM - AOL's popular instant messaging service - had outages for some of its users.

And it was through the Social Networks where I first found out about Jackson being hospitalized, and where I first found out he passed.

It was a Facebook post from a friend that announced he had been rushed to the hospital.

It was a tweet on Twitter where I first saw that website TMZ had reported his death.

A subsequent post by me on Facebook reporting that death led to one of the longest trails of response comments to anything I've ever posted on that site.

Interestingly, I didn't have a problem with any of the aforementioned outages on Twitter. It was my ongoing source for news, and perhaps because I use a third-party application to follow Twitter and send tweets, I was unaffected.

And apparently, I was far from the only person using Twitter to find news on Jackson and discuss it further.

Twitter as a tool to disseminate news is nothing new, in a relative sense.

It played a heavy role in Barack Obama's presidential campaign, and certainly some of the success of that campaign can be attributed to Obama's team understanding, and harnessing the power of Social Networks. It was used as a communication tool by an American student arrested in Egypt, and probably was what led to his release.

It has been used prominently as a communications tool in fighting large forest fires, and it was a way to spread eyewitness accounts of the terror unfolding in the 2008 attacks in Mumbai.

The first photos of US Airways Flight 1549 that crashed in the Hudson River off of New York City, were uploaded to the web via Twitter.

And of course, Twitter has been used prominently in the uprising over allegedly fraudulent vote totals in the recent Iran Elections. It played such a prominent role that the U.S. State Department asked Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance and downtime while the uprising was in full swing.

Times have changed dramatically over the last eight years, in a multitude of ways. I certainly wonder what might have been different about September 11, 2001, if the victims, rescue personnel, and people starving for news at home would have had Social Networking tools at their disposal.

Social Networking is not something that is just here for the moment, a mere flash-in-the-pan. Much like the internet itself, it is here to stay, and will play an even more prominent role in our lives as it matures.