And lo, here is another online revolution that could well change the face of modern-day travel. Twitter is the micro-blogging site that allows users to post pithy, 140-character updates that can be received by people who are “following” them. On his comeback show on Friday night, Jonathan Ross grilled Stephen Fry about Twitter. Stephen, you see, finds the service terribly useful when he’s on his travels. Here’s an example from his recent trip to Sydney: “Had a great walk round the Botanical Gardens: now I’ve got about 30 twitmate-recommended coffee shops to try out: may be wired by lunch.”
Over the past few months the site has hit the headlines with users posting updates on breaking stories before the mainstream media has even got a sniff. Oddly, Twitter’s status has taken off, pun intended, via the medium of plane crashes. In December, when a plane crashed on the runway in Denver, one of the passengers posted the event in understandably panicked terms on Twitter well before the local media outlets knew anything about it. When the US Airways flight crashed-landed into the Hudson the other week, one of the rescue workers posted a “tweet” and pictures on the boat en-route to the floating plane.
By: Benji Lanyado guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 28 January 2009 12.05 GMT
Twitter trips: liveblogged travelling with the Guardian | Travel | guardian.co.uk