Twittering Osama

Nancy Anderson
Posted by in Career Advice


Technology is ever changing, and more and more people are using it for more and more things, with social networking being a huge part of a huge amount of people. I found it interesting to find many stories on the web that told the story of how the explosion that started the Osama bin Laden capture was logged on Twitter by a local IT consultant who was not aware of what his initial tweet was tied to.

Sohaib Athar was awake late that night, and stated "I was awake, working on my computer when I heard a sound of helicopter. It was rare here. It hovered for about six minutes and then there was a big blast and power gone. I tweeted it because it was something unusual in the city." Upon hearing the explosion, he tweeted that he hoped it wasn't "the start of something nasty." Then a few hours later, upon hearing the news, he tweeted "Uh oh, now I'm the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it."

So, while he nor his followers knew at the time, he was live reporting on the finale of the worldwide manhunt for Osama. It was approximately seven hours after that first tweet, that President Obama announced the death of bin Laden, and then the connection was made. Athar had several hundred followers, but later on Monday after those tweets, his list of followers shot up to over 33,000.
 

On the American side, the information seems to have also appeared on Twitter about an hour prior to the President's announcement, when former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's chief of staff, Keith Urbahn, tweeted "So I'm told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn."


 

 
Jeff McCormack resides in Virginia Beach, VA. where he works as a web designer by day. In his off time he is a husband, father, mail order book store manager, and musician. Aside from being a freelance writer for this Tech Careers blog, he also seeks to assist in career choices and information by contributing to other Nexxt blog sites.
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