The Mars Phoenix spacecraft is on its happy way to Mars, due to land there on May 25. And what better way to find out how things are going than via Twitter? At the time of writing, the latest message is
Navigation continues to be "extraordinarily stable." A maneuver to tweak the targeting of the landing zone is planned for this Saturday.
That's some smart spacecraft. (Do you think it might be mediated through a human?)
Certainly in the past week or so the SMS-length service has proved its worth: the earthquake in China was, it's claimed, on Twitter before it was on the US Geological Service. (If you're scratching your head, see Making the most of Twitter.)
The applicability of Twittering to doing pretty much anything - which certainly includes reporting - is very interesting. The other day I was thinking that the first big news event where we talked about "the internet" being first to transmit the news was the Kobe earthquake of January 1995. Many people say that blogs were preeminent after the terrorist attacks of September 11. Then of course mobiles used for video (and Flickr photos) came into their own during the July 7 bombings in London. Maybe this has been Twitter's media proving.
(Also, what events have we missed out where mobiles or the web proved themselves?)
