Green's the theme for Twitter
Most Twitter users have undergone a cosmetic change to their user icon or avatar (mine is, too!). This was achieved by simply clicking a link that does all the work for you: click, your icon changes to green, and a tweet sends out that notifies others of your change. It’s easy to do, making it effortless to show support.
(A simple click shows support for Iran)
The inventor of this program said even he was shocked by how quickly all this took off, saying in a blog that:
“The funny thing is the 12 hours ago it was still in development, I gave the link to one person to see how the sites looks like and she clicked on the join link. 30 minutes later I saw 300 people already discovered it and 12 hours later over 20K people joined the cause and more are coming and coming.”
Perhaps the programmer best summed it up when he said, “I thought it will catch but didnt believe that SO fast. The web these days is truly amazing.”
This movement was created by a user on Twitter, who was part of a larger organization known as Help Iran Election. In Iran, the government has been trying to snuff out outside media sources so they can control information surrounding the election discrepancies. However, Twitter allowed millions of Iranians to connect with the world to talk about the struggle they are going through.
In fact, one huge story was about a teenager apparently named ‘Neda.’ If you so desire, you can do a quick YouTube search on her name and you will surely see her gruesome murder in the streets during a protest. It is both disturbing and poignant. Again, the Iranian government tried to deny this occurrence, but between Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Google, enough users found other ways of getting information out to the rest of the world. Neda’s death is now a symbolic call to arms, all stemmed from forwarded emails and tweets.
So, is this revolution being fueled by social networking? Not per se, but individuals who are trying to reach outside of their realm of influence are finding that trending topics and status updates may be the only way to make others realize what is truly going on. Obama is on TV right now speaking about all of this, so, like everyone else, stay tuned for the story on Iran.