If you wanted concrete evidence of the importance of social networking sites like Twitter, the Obama administration just gave it. The US state department emailed Twitter, The New York Times reported, asking it to delay its scheduled maintenance since this would have cut off its service at a time when Iranians were sharing information with the outside world about the series of protests around Tehran in the aftermath of the presidential elections there.
Twitter agreed to the request and put off the maintenance work because, the report quotes a blog post it put up, its partners recognised ‘the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran’.
