It matters not which side of the n-sided political spectrum you stand on, or even if you're jaded by your involvement in the tech sector, if you're not totally astonished by the instantaneous nature of street protest reporting today, you've lost all sense of shock and awe.

Not only are you now able to sit and watch Twitter stream updates from the heart of liberation squares in multiple places on earth, you're now able to monitor which tweets are generating more buzz than others, because they're being RT'd right before you very eyes.

And minute to minute, you're also able to track how well information is getting out from the liberation squares in multiple places, because you're getting instantaneous, albeit ofttimes garbled, updates on the availability of cell phone and Internet access.

Also now, in the heat of the moment, there's another feature out there making this elevator pitch: “By joining the cloud, you allow people to harness the power of free expression through the Internet. Global Proxy Cloud allows you to donate your unused bandwidth to ensure that governments can't keep their people behind the firewall.”

Even more fascinating, this morning Google and Twitter announced something called speak2tweet. You go to Google's website, find the appropriate phone number, call that number – and by the way there are 3 different ones available – and leave your voice message. Then through the magic of Modern Computing, and the power of the Cloud, your voice message will be posted on the Great Twitter Tower in the sky, and identified as relevant because #Egypt is automatically inserted into the tweet with a link to your sound bite.

Pro or con, your voice is now added to the din.

Let me repeat – I don't care where you weigh in on politics, this is all astounding and comes with an immediacy that's terrifying. The revolution has indeed been twitterized – and it's a thing of great and terrible beauty.

February 2, 2011

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