Flour Power

The Iran election has been all over the Internet in the last few days, due to the post-election protests over a suspicious (some say statistically impossible) landslide victory for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the current president.

With the Iranian authorities blocking a lot of web sites, like Friendfeed, and major news outlets like CNN failing taking a lot of time to report what's happening (it's now finally the top story), Twitter has proved to be the most active news source for the post-election protests.

Recognising this, the Twitter team postponed the scheduled maintenance to try and minimize the impact in Iran:

A critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter. In coordination with Twitter, our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight. However, our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran. Tonight's planned maintenance has been rescheduled to tomorrow between 2-3p PST (1:30a in Iran).

This is a very significant step by Twitter and a great way to show that they're serious about becoming a source of real time news. The #IranElection hashtag marks this as the top trending topic on Twitter at the moment, and hundreds of tweets per minute keep flowing.

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams predicts that Twitter will be something “that normal people do” within five years. He compares it to the early days of blogging (he was the founder of what became Blogger). When blogging started, most people didn’t get it and it seemed like a huge waste of time that only appealed to narcissists. Twitter gets a lot of the same criticisms, yet somehow more and more people find it a valuable mode of communication.

I still don't get Twitter, but I've been around there for a few months now, to try and figure out what's so great about it. Stuff like this Penny Arcade strip kind of scares me.

And it's also quite curious that on the same day this news comes out, I'm seeing a few of my friends starting to follow me on Twitter. I guess that no one wants to be just like "normal people"...

(via Techcrunch)