Recently unfriend was chosen as the word of the year by New Oxford American Dictionary. In a similar exercise, a Dutch group called Onze Taal voted twitteren as the word of the year. The twitter moment in the Netherlands occurred in February this year, when a tweet reported the crash of a Turkish Airlines plane very soon after the incident, and the news spread very quickly.
Twitter has had many other moments this year, when its speed and numbers made huge impact, such as during the presidential election in Iran. One wonders, however, if these moments will be memorable or merely epehemral. Does twitter possess the ability to change the course of politics, or more grandiosely, history?