In the early hours of Boxing Day 2011 Anuj Bidve was with a group of friends visiting Manchester when he was murdered. The identity of Mr Bidve was not announced until his next of kin back in his homeland of India had been informed by the police. Unfortunately the family did not find out about Mr Bidve’s death via the police but through Facebook.

At first sight this fact is shocking, my thought was that the police must have been very slow at tracing Mr Bidve’s relatives. In reality it would be very difficult to beat the speed of the Internet in general and social media sites in particular. The key here is that Mr Bidve was out with friends. Those friends are almost certainly on Facebook and it will probably have been via a message posted by one of them that the victim’s family discovered the awful truth. The police would have been trying to track down the exact location of Mr Bidve’s next of kin, then contacting the local police who in turn would have to dispatch somebody to tell the family of what has unfolded in Manchester. Meanwhile any of his friends could have posted a status update on Facebook that would have been visible to his family in a matter of seconds.

This is just another example of how social media is changing the world. Those of you on social media sites are probably already aware of the speed at which information is shared and that information can be transmitted far more quickly via social media than through TV, radio or newspapers.

Just today I learnt about the death of former Liverpool and Everton footballer, Gary Ablett, through Facebook rather than through traditional media outlets. The Arab Spring has been documented on Facebook and even more so on Twitter. Social media sites allow us access to information that at one time we would never have known existed. You Tube is alive with video clips of repression from many countries. It is little wonder that many of the more repressive regimes in the world look to censor the internet. During the riots in the UK during 2011 social media was blamed as being part of the cause of the riots, allowing people to communicate and organise themselves. However, it was also responsible for organising some of the clean up operations that took place in the shattered city centres.

Many technology journalists now see Twitter as a legitimate news source. I wonder how many news organisations use social media as a way of discovering news stories? By this I do not mean having a Twitter account and asking people to contact them with news. Rather I am talking about journalists scouring Twitter for news that is breaking. Twitter provides a virtual timeline of world events as they happen. In the US Andy Carvin of NPR (@acarvin) does just this. He is collating the Arab Spring and his Twitter feed can be very moving. I saw him interviewed on TWiG with Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis and Gina Trapani during which he revealed that he searches Twitter for words and phrases that people might use in a Tweet about a particular type of event. So he might search for the word “explosion” and then see what results he gets.

The world is changing at a phenomenal pace and we are all being swept along with it whether we like it or not. Our more inter-connected world provides us with opportunities to make new contacts and maintain old contacts in a way that would have been unimaginable 10 years ago. Along with the benefits there will be drawbacks such as the Bidve family have discovered this week. My condolences go out to them in this most painful of moments.