Student 'Twitters' his way out of Egyptian jail | Hacker News Reader

Student 'Twitters' his way out of Egyptian jail

cnn.com

16 pointsrms10 comments

"Twitter is a social-networking blog site"

Hah! The pace of the internet makes terms obsolete just as cnn starts to use them.

That is hilarious. In fairness though, I can't think of a good way to explain Twitter to a CNN-style audience, and I use it.

Twitter indexes thoughts and conversations, other words personal consumer information! Great for market researchers, as well as a company's who want to monitor brand and services!

I hate X company tweeted 1,000 times becomes very useful!

Typing "I hate <company>" into Google is the same thing. Twitter just lowers the barrier to entry (for writing "i hate foo").

But...more people will do this due to Twitter's 140 character limit! Also if you use a twitter search you can quickly gleam and tally up marketing data and monitor brand in a quicker fashion; demographics are easier to obtain too!

I don't understand why this community nor the digg community does not see the immense value of indexing short conversations of millions of people? After all it's information and what does Google index and make billions from?

Google indexes the internet, twitter indexes twitter. Which do you think will provide a more useful data set for marketing research?

Heck of all the people I know I can't think of a single person that uses twitter. However I can think of a dozen or two that have written product/service reviews somewhere on the internet, which would be indexed by Google.

Wow. I am surprised he was able to get out of jail. I am sure if I put something similar on twitter, my 6 followers would eventually read it and then reply 'oh, bummer.'

I don't get that title... It suggests that Twitter somehow helped him get out of jail, but... it didn't.

He just had his phone on him and Twittered from time to time.

good to see a free service, that is useful. Thats one way to make a loyal customer

Throws a pebble in the pond.

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