I’ve been somewhat called to task for my random musings about Twitter and Iran, which I thought were rather muted, personally. Hell, as a recent signup for twitter, i find it mostly annoying, with far too many people apparently eager to flood out useful information with the news that they had corn flakes for breakfast.

Twitter (and Facebook) has been crucial in Iran largely because its in the right place at the right time, which I suppose is a short-hand way of saying that product had hit a certain critical mass, yet the Iranian government was not prepared to contain it. Is there something unique and magical about Twitter? No – if this had happened 2 years ago, we might be talking about MySpace instead. 5 years ago – Orkut. 10 years ago, AIM and 15 years ago, Geocities or something. Social network software is incredibly faddy, and the ones that don’t go obsolete become understood by the Network Ops people of the world, and in most cases they CAN be contained.

If this revolution fizzles, twitter likely won’t be a major player in the next one. The Iranian government will know how to contain it then — or worse, subvert it. When CNN reports twitter feeds as real news, they are in fact reporting pretty thin gruel – unverified news from unverified, typically highly biased sources. Certainly Iran will have plans in place to use it to spread misinformation, but that’s okay because Twitter will likely be in the dustbin of social network history, along with Friendster and LiveJournal, and the kids over there will have moved onto whatever’s next. The real question is whether dictatorial governments will learn from this experience that they need to look that far ahead.

But then there’s the very real question of how oppressive the Iranian government can be without sending their country into the Dark Ages. As a reader of Andrew Sullivan points out, part of the reason that Iran has been relatively prosperous of late is because they HAVE been more aggressive in allowing their population to embrace their internet. But if in times of revolution the kids can’t twitter, they’ll use facebook or even Second Life. The only way to maintain pure control is to very nearly completely cut off access. So the interesting next question: is their government ready to plunge technological progress backwards in Iran about 30 years?