Twitter Re-schedules

For the non-Twitter-ers out there, here's something interesting.

Twitter is one of the few technologies that Iranians have been using to both communicate with each other (in Persian) and communicate withthe outside world (in English). A service outage was scheduled for tonight (right about now, actually) which would have thrown Twitter out of commission for 90 minutes. After numerous requests, around the Internet and on Twitter, Twitter was able to re-schedule the maintenance to happen during the middle of the night, Tehran time, so as not to disrupt them too much.

Good PR for Twitter, but still pretty cool. And an interesting illustration of how tied together things really are.

There's a lot of websites who are selecting some of the best tweets and re-publishing them. One of the most interesting users is @PersianKiwi, whose writing about what's going on in Tehran is fascinating.

Some sample tweets from the last 12 hours:

we are moving location - seperating - situation in Tehran is tense - cant explain #Iranelection

our street is quiet now - we cannot move tonight but must move asap when dawn starts #Iranelection

today is bad day for us - 3 of group still not contacted from Azadi demo and we have 1 injured - #Iranelection

It's worth saying, of course, that the veracity of all communications like this should be at least a little suspect, since they're anonymous and hard to verify in the middle of all this. But still ... turns out you can squeeze a lot of drama into 140 characters.