The website is called Twitter, the action is called ‘tweeting’ and the question remains as whether Twitter is all hype or whether Twitter is here to stay.  For those that are not familiar with Twitter, the user logs on to the Twitter web page and creates a user name and profile, then one has a 140 character limit to write (or rather ‘tweet’) about whatever comes to mind.

Recently, the New York Times published an article, Putting Twitter’s World to Use, which had some fascinating applications. For instance, Corey Menscher, a grad student at New York University, developed Kickbee, an elastic band with vibration sensors that his pregnant wife wore to alert Twitter each time the baby kicked: “I kicked Mommy at 08:52 PM on Fri, Jan 2!” Mr. Menscher is now considering introducing the product into the mainstream market.

Corey and Ellen Menscher developed a device that would alert Twitter each time the baby kicked when she was pregnant with Tyler.

Another interesting example is at Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital. Here the doctors were twittered throughout an operation to remove a brain tumor from a 47-year-old man. Tweets included: “A portion of the skull is being removed to allow access to the dura, the lining of the brain”. The article said that, “Medical residents and curious laymen following online asked the doctors what music they were listening to (Loreena McKennitt, a Celtic singer), whether the patient felt pain in the brain (no, just pressure) and how big the tumor was (the size of a golf ball). As is convention on Twitter, they tagged all their tweets with a keyword so anyone could search for the keyword and read the stream of posts.”

I think that takes tweeting to a bit of an extreme. I don’t think I would want doctors twittered during my surgery. Better to focus on task at hand and I hope they are not crowd sourcing the next step. But it just goes to show how explosive and far reaching this social platform is, being adapted to many different scenarios.

The article states that Twitter’s most productive use has been for businesses that want to better understand their customers, citing Dell and Starbucks. According to the article, some developers are creating tools to help companies “keep an eye on the buzz“. Akshay Java, a scientist at Microsoft, is trying to figure out a way to identify which experts are most influential on given topics by automatically analyzing the content of their tweets and who is in their Twitter network. Companies like Microsoft could use that information to figure out which ‘twitterers’ they should contact to create buzz about a new product.

So is Twitter a “colossal waste of time?” For some, yes, but for businesses who use it to market their products to an estimated 10 million users and growing, they would probably give a more positive response. I wouldn’t second guess 10 million users and call Twitter a fad. In 140 characters or less, it’s pure marketing genius!

The so-far mild swine flu outbreak has many people saying all the talk about a devastating global epidemic was just fear-mongering hype. But that’s not how public health officials see it, calling complacency the thing that keeps them up at night.

The World Health Organization added a scary-sounding warning Thursday, predicting up to 2 billion people could catch the new flu if the outbreak turns into a global epidemic. Many blame such alarms and the breathless media coverage for creating an overreaction that disrupted many people’s lives. Schools shut down, idling even healthy kids and forcing parents to stay home from work; face masks and hand sanitizers sold out – all because of an outbreak that seems no worse than a mild flu season.

Two weeks after news broke about the new flu strain, there have been 46 deaths – 44 in Mexico and two in the United States. More than 2,300 are sick in 26 countries, including about 900 U.S. cases. Eight patients under investigation in England have today been confirmed with swine flu, bringing the current total number of confirmed UK cases to 47.Those are much lower numbers than were feared at the start based on early reports of an aggressive and deadly flu in Mexico.

Despite the grim nature of these reports some have tried to raise awareness on this issue  in a fun way, using Youtube , as shown in the video below.

Public health authorities acknowledge their worst fears about the new virus have not materialized. But no one’s officially saying it’s time to relax. And experts worry that people will become too complacent and tune out the warnings if the virus returns in a more dangerous form in the fall.

Whether or not the current outbreak of swine flu translates into a world pandemic, we are already seeing information and and data spreading around the web at a staggering pace.

Many news organisations around the world today are linking to a Google map showing almost live data on reported cases. Whilst this may be a very useful tool, what few of the news organisations report is that it appears to have been created by Henry Niman, a biomedical researcher with a history of using the internet to forecast doom. Niman has claimed global pandemics were under way several times before.

The speed at which information travels brings opportunities and threats and we need to treat information we see on line with caution and respect.  The social web will deliver information on which we can rely and data which will sometimes deceive.