In today's ultra-fast world of microblogging (i.e. Twitter), the more followers you have, the better. Well, that's what Ashton Kutcher would have you believe anyway (nearly 2 million followers? Isn't that known as 'stamp collecting'?).
Personally, I'm a strong believer in online communities, so rather than quantity, it's more about quality. In short, I'd much rather have a community on Twitter I can have a two-way conversation with, rather than the population of a small country vying for my attention 24/7.
Collecting followers on Twitter has become a hobby for celebrities... but why do people want to follow them? It seems to have little to do with their personalities, and it has even less to do with the quality of their tweets (believe me, I tried following a few, but quickly tired of "this is what I'm eating" photos and profound quotes from lifestyle gurus).
However, should a person do something important, I might be inclined to follow them on Twitter so I can read about their experiences, whether they are deemed famous or not.
So, when an astronaut decides he's going to tweet from space, while carrying out a historically significant, brave and outright awesome mission to fix the Hubble Space Telescope, you might find me following said astronaut.
Michael Massimino (a.k.a. @Astro_Mike) took the opportunity of being the first human to ever tweet from space. At the moment, I don't think we can fully evaluate what this means, as Twitter could just as quickly disappear as it appeared (after all, Web 2.0 moves fast... who's to say Web 3.0 will include Twitter anyway?), it may just be a short-term trend. Still, Massimino was the first man to tweet from space, and that is Internet history.
But this goes way beyond the Internet, @Astro_Mike is providing the world with an intimate view of what it's like to be an astronaut orbiting the Earth. And he's doing it in 140 characters or less.
"As I closed my eyes to sleep last night I thought, 'These eyes have seen some beautiful sights today.'" - @Astro_Mike
His tweets range from the routine, to the inspiring, to the incredible, to the personal; but all of them provide an important viewpoint from life in space. What's more, @Astro_Mike has gathered quite a following. Before the launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis, Massimino had 100,000 people looking out for his tweets, today he has well over 300,000.
At a time when NASA's outstanding endeavours need to be shouted from the rooftops, we have an astronaut, in orbit, telling a global online community exactly what it's like to live in space. And he's proving to be rather popular. I think we can expect many more astronaut Twitter accounts in the future, which is no bad thing...
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