I was reflecting and re-reading many of my posts from the early days of this blog, and it was fun to look back and see what I thought the future would hold. I, and the founder of Gawker, doubted the future of blogs. I thought Google was the king of the world, and was surprised when Yahoo! beat them to the punch, announcing a web service that allowed people to post their personal pictures to the web (before they bought Flickr). It was a time when only 1 out of 5 people gave up their print newspaper subscriptions in favor of the web (who would have even thought about tablets!), and podcasting was proclaimed mainstream. Most of these posts were from 2005, but there was one post I vividly remember (it was only 2 years ago, but in Internet time, it feels like ages). I found it… January 15, 2009. Do you remember what happened on that day?
I had just returned from attending the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Vegas and was getting back into the swing of things. That afternoon, a friend’s status update on Facebook alerted me to the fact that a U.S. Air plane that crash landed in the Hudson River. About an hour after it happened, I looked to the usual places – CNN, NBC, etc. There wasn’t much. I had been using Twitter for almost a year, and thought I’d see if there was anything there. Sure enough, I found a person on twitter who was actually on one of the Ferry boats going out to rescue people (@JKrums) and had taken a picture with his cellphone and posted it to Twitter and Twitpic.
This single photo shut down Twitpic, due to heavy traffic. Additionally, I watched as his Twitter “followers” grew from around 500 to nearly 1000 in 15 minutes, and had over 300o followers a day later.
Not only was it the day I realized the rise of citizen journalism, but it was the day that I realized the power of Twitter. Thousands of people are connected in an instant dialogue. News and rumors can get around the world in the blink of an eye. In the couple of years since, Twitter has been credited with assisting during crisis, and even aiding in a revolution. While, to me, Twitter use (and uses) has almost hit a plateau, it will be interesting one day to look back at this post and be amazed at how both Twitter and the online world have changed.
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