Twitter And The Rainbow

This morning I was woken up by The Wife and kids at around 7:40 am. "Rainbow, rainbow!" my wife was screaming excitedly. Wringing my eyes, I reluctantly wobbled towards the other bedroom's window. Sure enough, there was a full size rainbow in the western direction from my house. As all rainbows are, this one was really beautiful too.

Twitter And The Rainbow

A few minutes later, as a religious morning routine, I got on to my computer. I browsed through the morning news on Times Of India and CNN, checked my work emails, checked my personal emails, fired up Google Reader and eventually moved to my TweetDeck. To my surprise, the TwitScoop pane was prominently displaying "rainbow" in the tag cloud.


I was not sure if the trending was really due to the rainbow I had seen less than half an hour ago from my bedroom window. So I clicked on "rainbow" and went to the TwitScoop page for this keyword.


Yes, it was really about the same rainbow. Folks were tweeting about the beautiful rainbow while they were commuting to work.

Twitter: The Next Generation News Wire

We have been aware that the newspapers are not doing well. I also know that Marc Andreesen has been predicting their demise for a while now. I have also seen Twitter as a news source during China's earthquake and Mumbai terrorist attacks. It is increasingly becoming as a news source, much faster and reliable than CNN or Reuters.

But this is really taking it to the next level. This has made it so local and personalized to me. It may be because this is the Silicon Valley and has higher per capita Tweeters than any other area in the world. Yet, this has been a great sample of the extreme potential on Twitter. Guy Kawasaki, you are absolutely right -- “For me, Twitter is more important than a cell phone... Twitter is a weapon.” Well in this case for me, Twitter is a rainbow.