Benazir Bhutto assassinated: Twitter's utility
If anyone needed convincing of Twitter's business utility, today is that day. — As I write this post, the Twittersphere is going nuts over the assassination of Benazir Bhutto which occurred around 5.15am Pacific Time.
Context & Ripple Effects
The March claim that Twitter was already finished contrasts with December signals of user growth and meaningful referral traffic for at least one publisher. The platform had also suffered a 12-hour outage, making its reliability a live constraint on any business use case.
The rapid conversation around Bhutto’s assassination gives Twitter a high-stakes demonstration of its many-to-many messaging model: attention and information can concentrate around an event without a conventional distribution channel.
First-order effects
- Twitter gains concrete evidence that users will turn to the service to discuss fast-moving, consequential news, strengthening its business-utility argument.
- The same public, many-to-many communications model heightens the corporate information-protection concern already associated with potential leaks from confidential meetings.
Second-order effects
- Companies considering Twitter as a communications or traffic-referral channel must weigh the reach demonstrated during the event against the service’s recent reliability failure and leakage exposure.
- Twitter’s ability to convert heightened participation into durable use becomes more important, given the reported rise in new users and its growing role as a referral source.
Third-order effects
- If consequential events repeatedly concentrate discussion on Twitter, the service’s strategic value will rest on operating as dependable public communications infrastructure rather than merely a personal messaging tool.
- The tension between open distribution and confidential corporate information points toward governance and reliability becoming as important to adoption as audience growth.
The trend: Twitter is emerging as a real-time, many-to-many communications network whose commercial value rises with public urgency but depends on reliability and information-control safeguards.