MindBytes

“Twitter” is all over the news in the Indian Media, specially  got its attention when Mr Shashi Tharoor, MP, Minister of State(External Affairs)  tweeted “Cattle Class” and “Holy cow” issues. He has more than 10,000 followers now(http://twitter.com/ShashiTharoor).  Many of my friends, created their twitter accounts soon after these  articles about “Twitter” broke out.

Few days back, i was telling my colleagues  ”What Twitter is all about” and how it’s presently being used by individuals for microblogging/social communication as well as organisations for their social marketing . Its become one of the most powerful tools, which provides real time updates about events happening across the world . For eg. During the Mumbai terror attacks, twitter was extensively used for posting of updates by the personnel,who were trapped inside the hotel and those all around the locations where terrorist attacked. Look at a snapshot of twitter during Mumbai Terror Attacks.

Tweets during Mumbai Terror attacks

The “Realtime” power of this platform did attract Google and Facebook , who tried their best to buy out twitter , but in vain. Facebook thereafter integrated a similar platform of its own.    Google has now integrated Twitter’s “Tweets” into their search results.

For all those who must be wondering, why Twitter’s Tweets are so important in search ill explain. There is always a time lag between the time of posting of a news article by a news agency and the time the article gets listed in the google search results.

This time lag may vary depending upon the ranking of the website from 5 mins to 15 days.Previously Google was not in a position to return any search results on such realtime queries.  Google  now queries the  key words on the Twitter platform and provides  twitter search results embedded inside the webpage, which also keeps updating itself  every milli second. You can also go to http://search.twitter.com directly to search for any real time tweets on any specific subject or topic .For eg. I just searched for “Chelsea” in Google. Amongst the results , even the tweets from the twitter are embedded on the search page.

A report by US military intelligence has claimed that the messaging application Twitter could be used by terrorists as an operational tool. Intelligence agencies are now monitoring this platform as future terror attacks will be aided by high technology gadgets and applications like Blackberry,Twiiter,YouTube(encrypted videos) etc.

The report into the increasing security implications of mobile technology envisaged terrorists using Twitter messages, or Tweets, to communicate and share images and locations of future terrorist attacks. “Twitter is already
used by some members to post and/or support extremist ideologies and perspectives,” the report said.

“For example, there are multiple pro and anti Hezbollah Tweets. In addition, extremist and terrorist use of Twitter could evolve over time to reflect tactics that are already evolving in use by ‘hacktivists’ and activis for surveillance. This could theoretically be combined with targeting.”

It notes that Twitter was used extensively by protestors at the recent Republican National Convention to identify the location of police and security guards in an effort to get around them. The report envisages Twitter also being used to identify the location of targets. It cites Tweets from US troops stationed overseas that could be used as information for
selective attacks.

“l’m in Bagram waiting for a flight to Camp Salemo by Kwost in the volatile east of Afghanistan near the Paki border. Hot days cold nights,” was one Tweet cited from an American soldier in Afghanistan that was posted on a publically available forum.Use of Twitter has been gaining ground fast and it is already being used in criminal cases, as well as updating work groups in business about changing goals.

So now you can imagine, a platform which has become a global search platform for “Realtime news” in such a short time  due to its simplicity and user friendliness, has also become a powerful and dangerous tool which can aid terrorists for real time communications.