The Centers for Disease Control is tweeting updates on the swine flu outbreak. Meanwhile, over the weekend Evgeny Morozov at Foreign Policy’s Net Effect looked at Twitter’s power to misinform:

[D]espite all the recent Twitter-enthusiasm about this platform’s unique power to alert millions of people in decentralized and previously unavailable ways, there are quite a few reasons to be concerned about Twitter’s role in facilitating an unnecessary global panic about swine flu… anyone trying to make sense of how Twitter’s “global brain” has reacted to the prospect of the swine flu pandemic is likely to get disappointed. The “swine flu” meme has so far that misinformed and panicking people armed with a platform to broadcast their fears are likely to produce only more fear, misinformation and panic.

If you’re wondering why Twitter’s catching fire (see analytics from Compete and Quantcast) Sarah Lacy at TechCrunch takes a stab at explaining it. She finds Twitter’s success in the constraints the site imposes. Less is more:

People feel like they know you, while you actually give up very little personal information. You get intimate connections with as many people as you want, but on your own terms. People can follow you, without you following them. You can still see what people you aren’t following are saying about you and respond, or not. And you can add someone for a bit, then unfollow them… lifecasting never took off in a big way because it was originally conceived as video. Many people don’t want to show that much of their lives, and most friends just don’t have the time to watch…

But Twitter is noncommittal, bite-sized lifecasting in a manageable text form. It’s similar to how I refuse to check one long rambling voice mail, but I’m happy to scan hundreds of texts or emails. [It’s] the difference between watching a vacation movie of your friend sitting on a boat in the water for an hour, versus reading one 140-character Tweet that your friend was sitting on a boat enjoying the sun.

Ironically, the asyncronicity of Twitter was hotly contested by a lot of early adopters who pressured the Twitter team heavily to change it to an auto-follow model. Evan Williams & crew always held out, convinced it was of key importance to how the site would grow and scale. Looks like they were right.

RELATED: For the academically minded, The Chronicle’s Wired Campus offers up 10 College Twitterers to Watch, “you can also pick up some great higher-education gossip, track down colleagues to collaborate with, or get advice on how to improve your teaching or research.”