Chaos Pavanred's Blog ….. Exponential Error

“Power of Twitter”… my witness

A few days ago I just realized the power of twitter, the ease with which the news and information spreads and the speed at which it spreads.

The course of events was something like this:

I watch the Belgian GP, and everyone knows how the race unfolded, Raikkonen crashes out of the race in the final laps, being a Raikkonen supporter i was pissed and a lap or two later, Lewis wins. I am more pissed and go out for a walk pondering, how tiny and subtle things can have catastrophic aftermaths in the long run. If you had watched the race then you would understand what I am talking about, Kimi is in the lead for 42 laps in the 44 lap race and then slight rain comes down, Kimi is on dry weather tires and he struggles for grip, Lewis forces Kimi to push that tiny little bit more than he should have, Kimi looses the lead, pushes harder and eventually crashes out. Then, championship standings after the race were Lewis is comfortably ahead of Kimi by about 20 points. If rain had come down 2 or 3 minutes later then Lewis, Massa and Kimi would have all been clogged up within 11 championship points and that would have made the season more promising and prospective (Kimi supporter u see ) . That's enough of the prologue.

Ok getting back to the point about my witness about power of twitter, am having my normal day routine later at night, surfing the net , working on some thing, whatever, and my twitterfox just pops up a tweet - "F1 Massa inherits Belgian win after Hamilton penalized: Ferrari's Felipe Massa has been declared the winner of Su.. http://tinyurl.com/6249qz "

I follow the link, I read about it, I thought, at least a sort of consolation.

Next day, On my way to work, a friend sitting next to me, arguably a F1 enthusiast, tells me - Hey, did you see today's news? Massa wins the race, Lewis is penalized. And the first involuntary thought that came to my mind was - eh! Wasn’t that yesterday's news?

Ha Ha that's power of twitter, without which, me getting this news update (Lewis penalized) the previous day would be reduced to a chance factor of me getting to a relevant news source after I got the news confirmation (watching the race itself). You know the odds of that happening, that would be heights of optimism to watch the entire formula 1 race, and go back a few hours later to the formula1.com or a news feed to check, just in case miraculously some one else won.:D

I know this is not any major news that would affect me if I got know about it a few hours later, but information is information, it just depend on the nature of the news, which defines its gravity. This reminds of the movie "Wall Street" I think, a dialogue in it goes something like this - its minutes before the stock markets close and this character is speaking on phone - I need the information now, at 4:00 I am a dinosaur (not sure about the quote, watched the movie long ago, but you get the point)

Twitter had reversed the normal flow; the news had come to me