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“The State Department asked social-networking site Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance earlier this week to avoid disrupting communications among tech-savvy Iranian citizens as they took to the streets to protest Friday’s reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The move illustrates the growing influence of online social-networking services as a communications media. Foreign news coverage of the unfolding drama, meanwhile, was limited by Iranian government restrictions barring journalists from “unauthorized” demonstrations. “One of the areas where people are able to get out the word is through Twitter,” a senior State Department official said in a conversation with reporters, on condition of anonymity.

 

 “They announced they were going to shut down their system for maintenance and we asked them not to.” A White House official said “this wasn’t a directive from Secretary of State, but rather was a low-level contact from someone who often talks to Twitter staff.” The official said Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, tweeted, according to news reports. “Twitter is simply a medium that all Iranians can use to communicate,” the official said.

 

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment yesterday.

 

It is hard to say how much twittering is actually going on inside Iran. The tweets circulated by expatriates in the United States tend to be in English — the Twitter interface does not support the use of Farsi. And though many people may be sending tweets out of Iran, their use inside Iran may be low, some say.

 

“Twitter’s impact inside Iran is zero,” said Mehdi Yahyanejad, manager of a Farsi-language news site based in Los Angeles. “Here, there is lots of buzz, but once you look . . . you see most of it are Americans tweeting among themselves.””

 

By Mike Musgrove Washington Post

 

Two things  occur to me reading that… First, Twitter does support Farsi. And Second, the main thing that Twitter has offered the GR88’s is multiple access routes [as in so many that even though its part of my job to know I’ve literally lost track] … I.E. Phone aps [I have three in mine], browser plugins [using one for FireFox], Google, Yahoo, etc. Homepage gadgets [use one for Google – cause no one in my business still maintains a Yahoo homepage], blog widgets [2112 sports one], and dozens upon dozens of ancillary sites that allow their users to post into Twitter and monitor Twitter without actually signing onto Twitter.  Which uh, makes the oft overhyped micro blogger very difficult for the evil Iranian Government to censor and or block.

 

To paraphrase the Immortal Bruce Lee, it is being water my friends.

Tags: election, green movement, iran