Tom Lee on the problem with a privately owned service -- Twitter -- serving as a platform for political activism:
That discussion of the Iranian election popped up on Twitter was not particularly surprising. The microblogging service is often mocked as a venue for the discussion of daily minutia -- a recent spoof was made up entirely of real-time reports about the sandwiches that users were eating -- but by now Twitter is clearly one of the most popular forums for online chatter about current events. But when the action on Twitter began to affect events in Iran, well, that was downright shocking. And to the extent that it signaled Twitter's arrival as an important political tool, it was also somewhat alarming.
Twitter is far from the only online tool being used for political ends, but it's one of the few that is both a medium and a company. Yahoo.com might handle your e-mail, but if it went down, the e-mail system would still work. Google search is important, but its disappearance wouldn't make the sites it indexes stop working, and there are plenty of search engines that would be glad to take its place.
Twitter is not like that. If it went away, that would be that.
