Some truly amazing things were happening on Twitter yesterday.

While the Iranian government was evidently trying to suppress grassroots information coming out of the country in the wake of its controversial election, street-level Iranians were Twittering news, information and photos. Servers were apparently shut down, but the IPs of functioning Iran proxy servers were being tweeted to assist in getting the information out (see first tweet in the screenshot above). Then word was passed that the government was monitoring Twitter, so a workaround for communicating functioning proxies was made known. Then Twitter announced scheduled maintenance, sparking an outcry to keep the system up and running, so maintenance was postponed. Meanwhile, user icons all over Twitter were turning green (see second and third tweets in the screenshot above), the color indicating support of Presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

Follow the stream tsunami of Iran election tweets over here — far more compelling coverage than anything you’ll see on teevee. Read Andrew Sullivan’s excellent writing about it all over here.

A huge takeaway from all this is pithily summarized by this tweet from@jennispinner: Social media’s best use isn’t sharing what u had for breakfast–it’s THIS.

Indeed.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under Internet Stuff, Social Media.