I was hearing/reading about Iranians using Twitter to spread the word about protests they were organizing, in reaction to the recent election and allegations of vote-counting fraud. Here's one example news story. The Iranian government had had some success closing down sites such as Facebook, but the distributed nature of Twitter (lots of people posting "tweets") apparently made it much more difficult to control.
This reminded of me of the Tiananmen Square protests in China 20 years ago. The government sought to control access to the media then (as it does today) in order to maintain control over information about the protest. But apparently one of the technologies used to get information out of the country was something relatively new at the time--the fax machine. People would fax updates to friends outside of China, who would spread the word among expatriate Chinese, and in some cases forward information back into the country.
It's great to see technology serve the interests of democracy movements! Now if Twitter can just turn this into a plan for "monetizing its asset"...
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