What is a Twitterstorm

The Twitterstorm is a description of an event where hundreds of 140 character messages are sent at the same time. The most recent example of this occurrence is the one that took place when news of Jaiku being swallowed by google broke. Both Twitter and Jaiku are similar. They both give you 140 characters to express yourself and they can both be taken with you.

When Jaiku was sold to Google the Twitter community has been wondering what's next for them. That is true, at least for those who are not heavy users of twitter. For the more passive user Jaiku is more appealing because it's got more bells and whistles. Twitter relies on your ability to express what is on your mind exclusively through text. Tinyurl does make the task a little simpler.

What made the storm so interesting is how over a period of just a few minutes hundreds of SMS could be received should you turn on twitter tracking as I did. I was been bombarded by messages at a tremendous rate. Everyone wanted to be able to say that they twittered the event. They did. Twitter didn't go down.

Jaiku did though, after all there's nothing more attractive than a website that's just become part of the Googleverse. It's fun to see these new media events. That's right BAMS students. Do media events still occur? Yep, and the Twitterstorm around Jaiku is one of them.

We shall see many more of them as big stories break.