Twitter has become an overnight success in the social networking world. I’m a fan, but I know a lot of people who are haters. I’ve always felt that there is plenty of potential for Twitter to be useful, but I’ve never been sure exactly how.

This week I figured it out.

I hadn’t found a lot of information about what was happening in Iran right after the election.  I knew people were upset and demonstrating, but Western media wasn’t putting a lot out there. I started following the #iranelection Trending Topic (“Trending Topics” are what they call popular keywords) on Twitter.

I found TONS of information there, but like most things on the Internet, a lot was crap. My first reaction was this is ALL bullshit. There was no way that the riots in Tehran could be so massive. There was no way the crackdown on protesters was so harsh. This had to be a lot of people just messing around or just a flat out mistake.  The same kind of mistake that happened when for a few hours people on Twitter thought California’s ban on gay marriage was overturned.

The photos, videos and news links (pointing to foreign media, of course) seemed to corroborate the tweets, but it still didn’t make sense. Why isn’t this on TV? The next day, nearly 24 hours later, major U.S. media outlets reported the seven dead in Tehran. They reported the raids on the university dorms. They reported everything I learned SEVERAL news cycles earlier.  How did the major U.S. news outlets get so schooled?

Well, the news was coming directly from the source. Students tweeting were in the thick of the revolution. The story was coming unfiltered and in real time.  There were guides being passed around on how to help these students pass along the information so it not only gets distributed to the largest number of users, but also so that the Iranian government can’t stop them.  The U.S. Government even stepped in by asking Twitter not to shut down for a scheduled maintenance.

What do the U.S. news outlets do when they finally got rolling?  The New York Times, CNN and Fox all posted the Twitter ID’s of actual students in Iran…so people could follow them — people like, say, THE IRANIAN GOVERNMENT!  How retarded can you get? That’s like if, during World War II, the U.S. posted the names and addresses of the people in the French underground. Now, I understand that Western media was kicked out of Iran, so that made it difficult, but this was just embarrassing.

Twitter impressed me big time through all this, and I’m not alone. Not just the site, but the people on it. Yeah, there are still the douche bags who tweet about every dump they take (I promise I’ll try to stop), but you can always filter them out. I think that if you’re a hater, you might want to give Twitter a second chance. It’s earned it.

Shameless plug: You can follow Kind of Lark on Twitter