My mum was down to see her new grandson a couple of weeks ago and asked me what I thought of twitter.
She had read about it in the Daily Mail and couldn’t understand why anyone would need to know that anyone was at Tesco, or that Stephen Fry was following Delia Smith.
I couldn’t really argue with her on those two but I did find myself explaining how it could actually be very useful.
The examples I gave her?
I still love Baker Tweet but that’s an obvious one and probably says something about my consumption of warm bread.
During the recent England – Algeria game the electricity went off in my house and twitter helped me work out where the nearest unaffected pub was still showing the game. Unfortunately space was limited:
http://twitpic.com/1zb0ym
After the recent England – Algeria game the water went off in my house and twitter helped me work out that I was not alone, the electricity cut had caused it and Thames Water were on the case (and blaming the electricity people).
And then of course there was the twitter snow map last winter that helped me see who was bunking off work due to half an inch of the white stuff and who needed food supplies airlifting in due to 6ft of drifting.
http://www.benmarsh.co.uk/snow/
The whole area of social media and networks as utility is clearly nascent and fascinating.
It would be great to see people share other personal examples of twitter utility here ….
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