Twitter Steals Apple’s Thunder
Even though there wasn’t any “killer” announcement yesterday at Apple’s “Let’s Rock” event it was very notable for an unexpected reason: the role Twitter played. I was posting sporadically throughout the event and thus saw the flurry of Tweeting activity that was going on around me. With no exaggeration, close to 90% of the posts were all related to the event and a large share of them were actually in San Francisco or London (which in itself is indicative of the tech professional skew of Twitter). Though the likes of Engadget have for some time posted live text commentary of Apple announcements this time Twitter democratized that role.
As you’d expect, some of the posts were simply echoes of each other and the novelty was seeing who could type quickest to get the newsbyte up first. But, and somewhat surprisingly, there was genuine diversity most of the time, ranging from office based journos conversing with their colleagues on the ground about Steve Jobs’ appearance, through to complaints about Jack Johnson. It seems that Jack Johnson wasn’t a good choice for the tech community with one major TV broadcaster tech correspondent logging off in discuss by the time Johnson started his second song.
There were also slightly surreal moments looking at live video footage streamed online from people’s phones within the very same room I was sat. One of my favourite posts of the night pondered whether Genius was simply an indication that Steve Jobs had never made a mixtape for a girlfriend. There were plenty more too, not really appropriate for this blog.
Twitter may well be a flash in the pan, but right now it’s got genuine momentum and much like a teenager trying to grow his first mouse hair moustache, one gets a sense of a community finding its own identity. Carrying on the metaphor, maybe the Apple event will go down as, if not the very first, one of the first kisses.
EDIT: BBC Tech Correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones on Twittering the Event