Metropol

Just experienced for the first time hearing about a breaking news story on Twitter before media outlets.

1625:

@mfhorne There's loads of black smoke emanating from the top of a building in Holborn! Anyone know anything?

Sky broke the story about 15 minutes later.

Obviously the latter need to demonstrate a bit more caution!

Tweets/TwitPics are being hashtagged with londonfire and can be followed here:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23londonfire

Mount Redoubt, a volcano in Alaska erupted a couple of hours ago and there is an ash plume 50,000ft in the air. Confirmed by http://www.avo.alaska.edu/activity/Redoubt.php

Learned that from Twitter BreakingNewsON.

I'm still waiting for a news agency to report it but expect it as a news story later today.

EDIT: AP reported the eruption at 0853GMT, around 2 hours after BreakingNewsOn did on Twitter.

and so is Twitter going to be absorbed into Google?

Seems possible ....

Apparently just product discussions or somesuch.

Could this kick TweetDeck into touch?

http://desktop.seesmic.com/

I'm giving TweetDeck a go, really good, but notifications are crap. This blog sums up what I mean very well:

The Tweetdeck notification system is not only annoying, it is also useless, they are trying the mimic the GROWL notification system for Mac, but without any of the benefits. The notifications contain no real information, like who tweeted what, it only contains a count. There is also no way for you to choose the location of the notification, by default it pops up in the top right of the screen. The major place, especially on windows, where important buttons are positioned. There is also no setting to adjust the time the notification would display for.

You can vote to have this feature added here.

Is it just me or is metrotwit becoming really dull? It really isn't as radical as it used to be.
It's either gone on holiday AGAIIIN or had a brain transplant.

You're going stale like that mouldy old bread i have in the breadbin.

Twitter badly needs more bandwidth.

Definately. Forever stalling, crashing, or pictures/backgrounds going AWOL.

It would also be nice if they increased how many API requests you can have in an hour, but I'm sure for the time being that is lower down the list.

Lorns wrote:Is it just me or is metrotwit becoming really dull? It really isn't as radical as it used to be.
It's either gone on holiday AGAIIIN or had a brain transplant.

Maybe we should have a guest twitter'er each week? Decided by a vote?? (No sob-story VT's though)

I'm going to start putting Metro Twit in my Follow Friday suggestions, might generate a few more members anyway.

I reckon metrotwitter has a crush on Robert Palmer.
He's just addicted to love.