"The French revolutionaries somehow managed in 1789, without being able to tweet to each other: 'Big demo planned outside Bastille.' The Iranians of 2009 look likely to fail, in spite of the invention of Twitter in the intervening 220 years."

"Social media is not at all a prime mover of what is happening on the ground," says Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Tom Friedman types the words, "Bang-bang beats tweet-tweet."

Overall, I am skeptical about the claims that Twitter has been instrumental in organizing the protests. I grant that it may have been very influential in publicizing them. But I'd like to see tangible evidence that 10 random Iranians found each other via Twitter and – communicating in Farsi –actually planned a rally. I think we are still short of this – most of the reports I've seen about the use of Twitter have focused mostly on the role it played in publicizing the violence or the already planned protests and rallies.