April 16, 2008
Twitter is Finally Useful for Something
The ubiquitously annoying program, Twitter, finally has bragging rights to being useful: UC Berkeley graduate student, James Karl Buck, alerted his Twitter network to his arrest in Egypt, sparking an international campaign for his release.
Buck was in Egypt doing a project on Egyptian bloggers who tend to be, according to The Mercury News "mostly leftist, anti-government bloggers." When photographing a demonstration, Buck and his translator, Mohammed Salah Ahmed Maree were both arrested. Buck sent the message "ARRESTED" from his cell phone to his Twitter network and had messages from his friends in Egypt and America working to find Buck and work on his release.
Buck was released last week, although Maree remains imprisoned. A petition for his release is circling the web. Buck plans on having a protest outside the Egyptian consulate at 10 a.m. on Friday.
Finally, a useful reason to have a Twitter. We finally succumbed to Twitter recently and haven't used it for anything more than letting everyone know when we're watching "Family Guy." Gah.
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I haven't used my Twitter account since setting it up months ago. Somehow, I don't think I'll need to use it on my next trip, which is to Idaho. Though one never knows.
Some decent uses of twitter, besides reporting imminent imprisonment, have been emerging.
For Berkeley fans of Cheeseboard pizza, you can follow cheeseboard and get an announcement each morning what the pizza variant will be that day.
Somewhat less useful, since the "channel" is so chatty, is following JetBlue, if you're a JetBlue fan.
Also, since this is the SFist site, it's interesting that the Shanghai "-ist" site, has a twitter feed, shanghaiist, while SFist doesn't.
And lately I've been complaining about problems with different bits of software and I've been getting questions by email about my issues from the software companies, for example, jajah.
Twitter was exceedingly useful during the non-torch-relay. I learned that the torch was on Van Ness easily an hour before everyone else at JH Plaza.