[SamAtt]

Twitter did facilitate the Iranian protestors. And facilitated getting the word out to the world. Twitter did help make the Kogi Korean BBQ Taco Truck a sensation! Twitter did keep us updated about Balloon Boy in real time.

Do you have any substantial proof of those claims? I know for a fact the first one is at least misleading (Every news outlet had people on the ground in Iran and they certainly reached far more people than Twitter did).

The point of the article is that people who use Twitter ascribe accomplishments to it without proof so you making the same claims without offering proof only makes the author's point.

[Ye-Ha]

Absolutely. Firstly, that I knew about all three.

Notice that, in my post, I reworded the 1st claim to say that it "facilitated" the protesters. (Are you sure that you read my "claims" carefully?) It was a real-time messaging service that the government wasn't able to shut down as easily as cell service that spread the word about what was going on and there is plenty of proof out there. Furthermore, one could argue that the Twitterers counted as "news outlets" supplying information not otherwise easily uncovered. It's like having a free workforce. (Of course, with a lot of Twitterers, you get what you pay for.) You may offer proof that this wasn't the case if you choose.

Secondly, lot's of people have blogged that they love the Kogi truck and followed it to find out when it would be arriving. Another score for real-time messaging from one-to-many. Even the editor of Bon Appetit wrote about it, How many other food trucks do you think she writes about? Major PR score!

Thirdly, the the proof is in the Tweets for all three examples. (I didn't follow balloon boy but I can picture the scenario that anyone interested could follow the balloon's path in real-time.)

Finally, I offered proof of my own claim as to it's usefulness for #profood. Tweet to them otherwise and see what they say.

What I and other posters are saying is that, even though it is a one-to-many messaging service and not a platform, it does have value and that Twitter bashing is as useless as a submarine with screen doors.

[yosh]

> Even the editor of Bon Appetit wrote about it, How many other food trucks do you think she writes about? Major PR score!

That's probably more due to the fact that Kogi made the New York Times and the LA Times, than due to direct Twitter awareness. Kogi often has long lines now, but that pretty much started happening when it hit traditional media. The first time I went to Kogi was last December, before it hits NYTimes/LATimes, and there was no line.

Definitely Twitter helped them hit their early following, but it doesn't seem that a majority of their customers now use Twitter. Last few times I've been waiting in line for Kogi, most people I talked to around me got the word that the truck was there due to their website itself, or word of mouth from friends.

> I didn't follow balloon boy but I can picture the scenario that anyone interested could follow the balloon's path in real-time

You could have also followed it on CNN. It's funny that Balloon Boy is an example. That story was not broken on Twitter, but via traditional news channels, and all the Twitter chatter was based around updates from those same traditional news channels. Except if you tried to follow the story on Twitter, you'd have way more noise to filter through, as Twitter has a lot of redundant posts (Retweets don't add any value when you're searching).