Twitpic bug shows the downside of trusting social software

After reading about BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones's worrying incident after a Twitpic bug swapped an innocuous image for a rather less family-friendly one, it acutely shows the problem with all the myriad of social software, free tools and applications that become an integral part of our lives, and are even used regularly for work purposes.

You have to trust that the people behind it can keep the tool going and the service reliable in order to honour the faith and trust put in by signing up.

Twitter has become a valuable tool for news producers: at my paper we have a Twitter feed that also powers our facebook status, and if that became buggy like in Rory's experience or stopped working it would impact on our audiences perception of us as a publisher as well as the tool in question.

Blogging the news

Some thoughts on a strategy for how best to deliver breaking news alongside newspaper content and keep some clarity for users and the newsroom alike:

A separate breaking news editorial channel, purely for blog-style raw as-it-happens coverage, before a fully rounded story is published in the main news channel.

Use Twitter for interview's (dare I say Twinterviews?) before publishing full story as news/feature - as used by George Hopkin.

Also noticed a follow-up blog post by Adam Tinworth on blogging, journalism, standards and the NUJ which has developed via the comment stream into a debate on the nature of blogging in relation to journalism, and whether journalistic standards should be applied to bloggers.

The initial questions are: define blogging; what are the stated aims and audience of a particular blog; where does Twitter fall in this, micro-blogging as it is, there should still be best language/grammar rules followed if it's published by an established news provider.

To twitter or not to twitter

The key to twitter's success, is tying it in with networks like facebook. The market for these sort of social tools is becoming crowded, so they either have to be pure simple genius enabling the masses or a hardcore niche audience, and ideally able to work with existing networks and environments.

BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones writes:

But I'm not convinced that Twitter is really going to spread in the way Facebook did, beyond the digerati into millions of people's lives. What's more, I'm struggling to understand the business model.

Making a reasonably successful tool a revenue winner can be key to its lifespan, but there's not much to twitter, so adding commercial twits might start to turn off users?

Twitter works for some people, others don't get it or feel the need to document their life, which is why not everyone in the world keeps a written diary.

Not sure if twitter will grow in the same way as facebook, but its got a decent chance now it can be integrated.