Twitter's big media debut

Was John McCain’s “twitterview” a sign of Twitter’s coming-of-age, or its demise?

George Stephanopoulos has demonstrated that he can interview a top politician via Twitter, said Richard Huff in the New York Daily News. “Now he should step away from his Blackberry.” His “twitterview” with Sen. John McCain might have been a journalistic first, but the “gimmick” flopped. Instead of a meaningful dialogue, it was like “high school kids texting each other.”

The twitterview may not have been a high point for journalism or politics, said Larry Magid in CNET News, but it was a “watershed moment for Twitter.” The actual 140-character-at-a-time back-and-forth was at best an “interesting experiment,” but Stephanopoulos used Twitter to great effect to gather questions for McCain from regular citizens.

The twitterview was “a little weird,” like watching “a tennis match on delay,” said Andrew Heining in The Christian Science Monitor. But surprisingly, the adoption of microblogging by “everyone from Martha Stewart to your crazy uncle” doesn’t mean that “tech darling” Twitter has “jumped the shark.” On the contrary, it’s becoming an increasingly “useful tool” for the technophile and technophobe alike.