Luna Maya, Yukio Hatoyama, John Chow, and Twitter

A gorgeous Indonesian artist, a Japanese Prime Minister, a wealthy online businessman and one of the most renowned and widely used social networking sites in the early 21st century....What connects the four of them? That's the question you might be asking as you read the title.

Luna's ill-fated tweet

As you all know, Luna has made major headlines in Indonesian mass media these past few weeks after her earth-shattering tweet:

Infotainment derajatnya lebih hina daripada pelacur, pembunuh! may your soul burn in hell (Infotainment is lowlier than sluts, murderers! may your soul burn in hell)

The celebrity published her tweet after a night filled with anger  being pursued by infotainment 'journalists'. The following day it sparked off a mind-blowing controversy she never anticipated. Later Luna admitted she had concealed her accumulating wrath after being falsely reported by infotainment journalists for many times. Luna added infotainment has caused her more damage than betterment.

Yukio's first tweet

In my mind, it is hard to believe that there are some people living in a developed and affluent country like Japan who are not internet savvy. Twitter and blogging are two things that even a ten grader of high school here at my hometown is very much familiar with. But for an exceedingly busy government top official like Yukio Hatoyama, being a Twitter virgin is absolutely understandable.

Yukio's Twitter virgin status, however, had changed on the last new year's eve. Yukio signed up hiw own Twitter account. At the same moment, he launched a personal blog too.

There are some reasons of course why he did all these things. This is what I read:

In his blog, titled Hato cafe, Hatoyama said: "I started this blog as a first step to burying the gap between people and politics as well as changing this country together."

He also uploaded to the blog a picture of his office roof against a backdrop of blue winter sky, explaining that he took the picture with the camera on his mobile phone. (...)

Support for Hatoyama's cabinet has dipped below 50 percent for the first time according to major opinion polls released last month. Voters criticised his lack of leadership and a funding scandal.

In his blog, Hatoyama apologised for a political funding scandal that has embroiled a former aide, saying: "I gave a lot of trouble to many people last year. Listening to the people's voice, I want to do my best to fulfil my duty." (source)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I'm concernedafter Obama's successful online campaign (he has got a site on his own name and a blog if my memory serves right), Yukio is the second world political titan I think trying to make most of web 2.0 technology. I wonder if SBY will do the same thing. Good enough to know that some of our politicians and officials now start to turn to the Internet. Tifatul Sembiring, Indonesian Informatics and Communication Minister, has run his own twitter account. Some of legislation candidates were also struggling to win the 2009 legislative elections  by running a Facebook account.

John Chow: a dot com mogul

If this is the first time you heard this name, I tell you 'welcome to the club'. I just discovered this name months ago while surfing the web but I never got interested in finding out who he is until few days ago. This genius was reported to make US$1,000 per week for a sponsored tweet, and that amount may be still growing! Don't believe it? See for yourselves here.

So what have I learned from those three stories, folks?

To me,  it's not about Twitter itself. Rather, it's more about how we use Twitter.

If you are a tweep (a person with a mutual following on www.twitter.com), you'd better learn Luna's precious lesson that your personal tweet is a potential source of problem. The internet is like a giant billboard where everyone can have access so my advice is never tweet while you are being enraged or furious. A less clear-headed person's tweet tends to be thorny, acid, and offensive. Impulsive or high-tempered people are also inclined to reap similar problems. You might apply higher privacy settings to prevent strangers from viewing your tweets.

As for Yukio Hatoyama, we now see more and more politicians using web-based technology to gain people's favor and support. This is such good news since we know by blogging and tweeting politicians are able to provide more information in a more efficient way. Politicians can rapidly learn what problems their people are still having and figure out the solutions or react to that accordingly. I guess it's a cutting-edge breakthrough if we -laymen and grassroots- can directly tell what bothers our mind to public officials with no bureaucracy and procedural barriers. For instance, I can tell my governor by tweeting on his account if I may find any corruption cases real time.

Speaking of John Chow, I entirely agree on the idea that making money online using internet technologies like Twitter is proven to be one of the best solutions to tackle sky-rocketting unemployment rates and poverty at the same time. The web has been the source of enormous potential income sources that most of Indonesians still overlook. So why do we spend more money for internet connection only to create more problems like what happened to Luna Maya while we can actually make money with it?