July 29: Instant Gratification: Now Even More Instant-Er

It's official. The future is now. Books and articles have been written about the impact the Internet has had on Generation Now. Every day more and more people were getting their news via the Internet and morning papers were going by the wayside. How could getting the news on the Internet get any faster? It couldn't, right? Wrong.

I don't "tweet," but I am on Twitter. For those of you that aren't members, it may seem pointless, but trust me, it's pretty cool. The way it works is a user has 140 characters to write a message. These messages can be anything from an update of events planned to a link to an interesting website. Other Twitter subscribers can then "follow" these updates (or tweets) and have each tweet sent to their Twitter account. Confused yet?

Let me try to clear things up. Let's say I have five friends that have Twitter accounts. These friends find me on the website and click the follow button by my name. Now every time I send a tweet, it is forwarded to each friend. If I decide to tweet, "I'm going wakeboarding tomorrow" that message will be sent to my five followers and they now know that I'm going wakeboarding tomorrow. I don't follow any friends or send any tweets myself, but I do follow the Padres, Major League Baseball Trade Rumors (MLBTR), Funny or Die, and a few others. And here is where today's topic comes into play.

The MLB trade deadline is on Saturday and teams that are chasing a division title are scrambling to beef up their rosters. The fun thing about Twitter is that anytime MLBTR or the Padres representative catches wind of a rumor, they can tweet via text message and that message will be instantly forwarded to me. I could speed things up even more by having all new tweets sent to my phone, but I choose not to. I was, however, at my computer when the rumors of Miguel Tejada being traded to the Padres started surfacing.

At first it was a forwarded message from a Padres' writer stating the Baltimore Sun was reporting he had been scratched from tonight's game. Could this mean he had been traded? Then it was a similar message from MLBTR followed by another Padres' tweet about a Minor Leaguer in Baltimore's system being scratched. Could this mean he was being promoted to replace Tejada? Within five minutes and three tweets of speculation later, MLBTR broke the story that the deal was, in fact completed.

In between tweets I kept visiting MLB.com to get an official word, but received nothing. It wasn't until about a half an hour later that MLB had updated its website and mentioned the trade. One could argue that without the Internet, there would not be Twitter, but the fact remains: A medium that is replacing newspapers with instant gratification has now become even more instant.