Twitter now officially part of the live web

Dennis Howlett comments that Twitter gain business cred after the recent assassination of Benazir Bhutto. He notes that when Katrina struck, blogs sprung into action spreading the news, but Twitter has proven far faster at relaying reaction.

Blogs and Twitter have a lot in common:

• As JP Rangaswami notes, Twitter is a pub-sub platform and so are blogs (when combined with RSS).
• Both give plain old folks on the Web the ability to publish their thoughts and views without any gatekeepers.
• As pub-sub platforms, both give readers control over messaging and what they see (in contrast to email).

Blogs and Twitter differ in some notable ways as well:

• Blog posts typically take more effort that writing 140 character messages on Twitter and thus are usually lengthier and, usually, more well thought out.
• Tweets are quick and people expect the content to be a mixture of the important and the trivial.
• Twitter is centrally controlled whereas blogging is distributed. That gives Twitter an advantage in ease of use, but a disadvantage in reliability.

Doc Searls calls the ability of the Web to bring us what's new (not just the news) the "Live Web". Twitter, in becoming part of the way people communicate about what they want to talk about, is quickly becoming one of the key players in the Live Web.