Tweeting from the top of the world

As TechCrunch reports today, Twitter has reached new heights. No, I'm not talking about some other lame celebrity latching on to the microblog so their lackeys can tweet for them. This time the service really has gone higher. Gavin Bate, an Irish mountain climber, has been tweeting his ascent of Mt. Everest this month.

Bate is on Everest for his fourth try at the summit to raise money for his charity, Moving Mountains. Unfortunately, the last update on his Twitter acount was made by his support team at base camp as Bate became ill high on the mountain and had to descend quickly. Evidently extreme cold (is there any other kind at 23,000 feet?) caused his mask to freeze and prevented him from taking oxygen. Without it, he could not continue. He was of course unable to tweet this himself because he was near death and his fingers would have frozen immediately had he removed a glove to type. If you're interested in reading more about Bate and his expedition, you can check out his website My Everest Challenge.

This is a great use of Twitter and one of the most novelu use cases that I've seen. Twitter is the perfect vehicle for expeditions like this in which readers actually care about what the writer is doing and where they are. I could care less who Oprah has on her show or who Ashton Kutcher is punking today, but allowing me access to up to the minute progress of a guy climbing Mt. Everest, and I'm sold. As Twitter becomes more and more mainstream, we're going to see more uses in extreme conditions. In fact, just last week we also saw the first tweet from space.