Twitter and Iran Elections

I'm sure everyone has now heard about the roll Twitter is playing in
the current protests in Iran (apparently 15,000 tweets an hour, which
I'm trying to follow rather unsuccessfully). In particular, it has
received lots of news coverage [1] as Iran has shut down Facebook [2]
(although apparently now access is unblocked, which should be familiar
to those of us who remember Iran filtering Orkut.

This got me thinking of the importance of open social networking and
open micro-blogging, and how if these technologies were more widely
people in Iran might not have such a precarious grip on what are now
clearly important journalistic and political tools - after all,
Twitter would have gone for scheduled maintenance apparently, leaving
some of its users in Iran without Twitter, had it not been for
intervention by the U.S. Yet, would it not be better to have a
technical solution rather than rely on the U.S. govt. asking Twitter
not to postpone their maintenance?

So, to sketch a use case - how can investment in such an open stack
help people not have their social web services so easily shut down,
either inadvertently (such as when a server crashes) or on purpose
(such as a government using the domain name system or legal threats to
shut down a single social networking or blogging site)?

I'd like to hear thoughts, and especially links to enlightening news
stories or use-cases?

[1]http://cbs2chicago.com/topstories/twitter.iran.tweets.2.1046306.html
[2]http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2009/05/iran-ahmadinejad-islam-facebook-social-networking-mousavi-tehran.html

Received on Tuesday, 16 June 2009 18:47:30 UTC