Iran's Brutal Riots Have Finally Validated Twitter

Since the dawn of Twitter, the annoying status-message service which allows millions to broadcast their most banal thoughts about lunch and teevee to dozens of followers, we have all awaited the moment happening right now in Iran.

We have all waited for some sort of important news event to justify our use of Twitter and Facebook, those pointless time sinks we engage instead of talking to our families, or occassionally braving our own neighborhoods.

And now, even though few of us in America have anything to do with it, big events are happening in Iran -- and a few people are using the favorite text update service of Oprah Winfrey and Newt Gingrich to share violent street news from the Iranian post-election riots.

The Harvard Twitter expert Jonathan Zittrain told the New York Times on Monday, "The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what makes it so powerful."

Indeed. Not since FDR changed America with the previously useless medium of radio has such an unlikely fad found a worthy purpose.

Will that purpose last? No, of course not. Just as the great heroics of early CB radio soon led to the usual prostitution and drug dealing behind truck stops, Twitter will quickly escape its brief moment of relevance. The Iranian situation will resolve, one way or another, and many thousands of excited Twitter voyeurs will quickly forget which one's got the ayatollah and which one has the war with 140,000 American troops. Who can tell, really, in the long run?

A popular post-9/11 country song proudly noted that the singer didn't know the difference between Iraq and Iran, and there's absolutely no reason to believe that will change just because of this week's big news, or because America has been fighting a terrible war in one of those countries for a half-dozen years.

In other words, Twitter is changing the way we live. Don't be shy, just sign up for a Twitter tonight. I sure did, and my life has never been better.

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