Hinweis: Die deutsche Version dieses Postings findet sich in meinem deutschen Blog.
The last few hours, I have the feeling to experience something really special. Since the elections in Iran on Friday and the announcement unbelievable election results in Iran is seething with rage: Where is my vote?
The accusation: election fraud. And that resonates not only through the streets of Tehran - no, it echoes through the vastness of the Internet with thousands of voices. The echo has a name: “Retweet”. And the medium of the echo is an invention which especially in the past days I would like to call: “revolution of the Internet”.
A small blog – a “micro blog”
Twitter is a so-called micro blog. 140 characters to put your thoughts, feelings and expressions in. And who would have thought that such a small amount of characters can awaken so much emotions. For an company internal micro blog called Trillr I once answered the question what Trillr is good for. My answer: You are at the heartbeat of the company. And that's true – true for Trillr and for Twitter.
Twitter in the news
For some days, Twitter is also constantly mentioned in the news of German television. Isabel Schayanis, Islamic scholar and editor of Monitor – a German telecast, put it very well on June 17th in a commentary in the telecast “Tagesthemen”: “And what are their weapons? They hold their cell phones up into the air!” - Because that's all you need to send 140 characters around the world through Twitter.
Retweet waves
To make this all work you need Retweets. That's because your message only goes to all those who said they want to receive updates from you – your followers. Some have 20, others over 1000 followers. But your followers might do some magic: They can retweet – they copy your message, place a “RT <yourname>” in front of it and send your message to their followers. The rest is known as snowball effect.
So Retweets go through the Internet like the waves of an ocean. Some with short messages like “I am on a demonstration right now”, some with links to pictures, some with links to videos like for example in Youtube.
Hashtags
And to ensure that all information can be found, the so-called Tweets are provided with Hashtags. In other areas you would just call them keywords or tag like it is used in social bookmarking services for example. The keywords all begin with a double cross, the “hash”, so that services such as Hashtags.org can filter the messages. The best known Hashtags about Iran-election are:
- #iran
- #iranelection
- #gr88 - stands for "Green Revolution 1388" and was invented by the Twitter user @iran09 - Iran Election 2009. “1388” is the year 2009 in the Iranian calendar.
It's also impressive to see how these hashtags raised in usage counts in the past days – here using the example for the hashtag #iranelection:
I am feeling with you!
For me these short messages from Iran raise a lot of emotions. Of course I don't feel as if I am there, part of the demonstrations – how could I? But I feel with the Iranians who are concerned about their votes which seem to be lost. I really wish that this “Cyberrevolution” - the revolution boosted by the Internet – will be a success. A great success with hopefully not more blood beeing shed – a peaceful revolution with the mobile phone raised to signal the protest!
Berliner Morgenpost – Der Iran twittert Morgenluft
The newspaper Berliner Morgenpost published a great article on 16.06.2009. One quote is a German word-play is: “Der Iran twittert Morgenluft” - roughly translated as “Iran scents the morning breeze” - translated but loosing the word-play.
The article explains in easy terms what Twitter is and that we might just experience the “revolution of the revolution” with the protests in Iran. Having written this, the article puts in words my deep feelings inside my heart.
