Tech Central: Twitter - the hottest thing since Facebook

Mike Wilson scrambled from a smouldering aircraft, losing his glasses and landing in a snowy ravine. Then he did what any software engineer worth his iPhone would do in the circumstances: he posted a live report of his situation online on his Twitter account.

“Holy f***ing s*** I was just in a plane crash,” he said, in a post sent via a text message shortly after Continental Flight 1404 careered off a runway at Denver international airport.

The buckled fuselage of the aircraft was ablaze in a ditch, the landing gear and one engine torn off, interior compartments melting in the heat.

Firefighters would later tell reporters that the sight was akin to a scene from an action film, but long before any other accounts emerged Mr Wilson was reporting live to his friends, family and rapidly growing following on Twitter.

The “microblogging service” allows users to send an incessant stream of reports from their computer or mobile phone, updating the world on the very latest developments in their lives in messages no more than 140 characters long.

Readers of Barack Obama’s “tweets” were kept abreast of his frenetic travels through the US before the American election. Others have microblogged proposals of marriage and the emotion of seeing one’s wife give birth, live from the hospital bedside.

Mr Wilson’s readers had learnt earlier that he had “filled up my car for the first time in over a month” and that he had cancelled a planned fishing trip because of torrential rain.

On Saturday evening, a few days after he finished his Christmas shopping and wondered why “Boulder County basically doesn’t plough its streets and highways when it snows”, Mr Wilson, 37, of Denver, Colorado, became the first man to tweet live from the scene of an air crash.

“Ugh,” he wrote, after scrambling down the wing to safety. “My glasses fell off in the mass exodus getting off the plane . . . Can’t see very much.” He did not let this hamper him unduly. He had soon uploaded a picture of the crashed aircraft, taken with his phone camera.

“This was crash [No] 2 for me,” he observed. He had once been a passenger on a small aircraft that made a water landing. “Maybe I should start taking the bus,” he wrote.

Thirty-eight passengers were hurt in the crash. Firefighters said that it was a miracle that no one was killed.

At first passengers were herded into an airport fire station, then to one of the airline’s lounges where, Mr Wilson noted, they “won’t even serve us drinks”.

“You have your wits scared out of you, drag your butt out of a flaming ball of wreckage and you can’t even get a vodka-tonic,” he wrote. “Boo.”

Mr Wilson’s reporting was then interrupted when the battery on his phone ran out. He resumed communicating with his followers as soon as he made it home.

One wellwisher inquired after his laptop. “(S)ounded like my mac is likely melted to the floor,” he replied.

The following day, passengers from the crashed aircraft boarded a fresh flight to Houston. “Touchdown! The crowd goes wild!” Mr Wilson wrote upon arrival. “Wife just picked me up from the airport. Relieved.”

Tweeting

— Twitter is a social networking and “microblogging” site where users send and read other people’s updates, called “tweets”. These are short messages of up to 140 characters sent either via the website or a mobile phone

— Three million people have signed up to use Twitter worldwide

— Twitter users were among the first to hear, and so spread the news about, the Mumbai attacks, earthquakes in California and the death of the actor Heath Ledger

— Famous Twitter users include Stephen Fry, John Cleese and Jonathan Ross

Sources: Twitter; Times Online

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