Why Twitter? Why Twitter could subvert government censorship in Iran when other Web 2.0 services could not.

While the effect Twitter had on the scale of the protests following the disputed Iranian election remains uncertain (there are only 19,000 registered Twitter users in Iran, while estimates for the number of protestors range from a few hundred thousand to three million), there is no doubt that Twitter played an essential role in broadcasting the events on Tehran’s streets to the world.Journalists were deported and detained, text messaging and cell phone service were temporarily jammed, Facebook was blocked, and internet traffic is always subject to finely-turned filtering in Iran.  Yet, despite these obstacles, Twitter enabled individual citizens to keep up-to-the-minute information flowing out from Iran’s borders.

So, the question remains:  Why was Twitter, as opposed to other social networking sites or Web 2.0 services, able to circumvent Iran’s stringent censorship regime?  The answer, as Harvard law professor and Internet expert Jonathon Zittrain put it, lies in Twitter’s “half-baked” design. 

Facebook and MySpace are designed to be centralized, self-contained worlds. Their networks are comprised of millions of colorful, personalized web pages that contain vast amounts of information – everything from personality tests to thousands of pictures, videos, “wall posts,” etc.  Yet, to access these virtual universes, to post or view any information, one must first “log-on” via the networks’ home sites.  In closed societies, this is their Achilles’ heel.  Government censors can easily block a social network’s home page, preventing people in the state from accessing the virtual world, cutting them out of the network.

Twitter, on the other hand, presents an entirely different framework.   It is a more austere service that facilitates succinct, immediate, and constant communication with other users in the Web 2.0 sphere.  It is not run through a central home page, but rather Twitter is specifically designed to easily integrate with other web services. Twitter is “half-baked” in the sense that its open API allows others to build on the service, creating new programs that permit data to flow from multiple sources.  As its creators envisioned, there has been a proliferation of applications that allow individuals to send and receive tweets using SMS, IM services, e-mail, blogging software, or even other social networking sites.  This versatility and decentralization means that even if Twitter.com were impounded, messages could still be sent and received from multiple sources.  To shut down Twitter, one has to shut down the entire service, presumably via petition to the company or a sophisticated cyber attack.