Hands up anyone who has used IRC? OK, now hands up anyone who has used an IRC client like mirc and left their computer logged onto a channel?

You may be wondering why I ask, but a blog post over on pcpro.co.uk got me thinking about this. News travels fast across the internet... really fast. I remember when I was at university, I used to leave my computer logged in to IRC channels. There was an on campus IRC channel, and others that I regularly chatted in.

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As soon as any news broke anywhere, that news filtered through IRC often before half the news websites had caught up. But more importantly, any issues with MSN servers, email outages etc were across the channels incredibly fast. If you had an email client set to check your hotmail email every 5 minutes, and a server went down just after an auto-check, you would probably see a message about it in the chat room before your email client had a chance to notify you.

I admit, this is probably slightly idealising life with IRC, but it was often the way things happened. IRC is still around, but there's a new medium in town and it's called Twitter. This micro blogging site gets more than its fair share of updates from users telling the world that they are just tucking in to a piece of cake. But recently there have been a few stories of searches for missing people being initiated over Twitter. And today, it seems that a Gmail server went down, and in line with that was a massive spike in tweets with the keyword gmail in them. This suggests that as soon as the server went down, people started to notice and started to tell all on Twitter.

So could Twitter be the new way that news like this spreads through the internet with such speed? Afterall I haven't used IRC for a long time, and many that I know have similarly moved away from it. It certainly seems like Twitter is rapidly growing beyond simply micro blogging, I've even had mini conversations using @reply on Twitter. Time will tell of course, but it's interesting to see how Twitter is being used in ever more diverse ways.

If you haven't checked it out already, head over to www.twitter.com and have a look for yourself.