• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 9, 2011

Twitter, designed to work on SMS with its 140-character limit, has become the medium to disseminate information in real-time from the more than 5 billion active mobile phones worldwide where a cellular signal is available. The power to transmit a thought within seconds translates into a medium for social change.

At Federated Media's Signal L.A. marketing conference Tuesday, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone shared thoughts on how Twitter and real-time social media continue to change the world. When asked by Julia Boorstin, CNBC media and entertainment reporter, whether Twitter forces transparency across a variety of topics, Stone said Twitter "gives folks who might not otherwise have a voice a voice."

Stone says Twitter will continue to create a network that allows anyone in the world, even from those places with the weakest of signals or Internet, to have a voice and let it be heard.

He added that Twitter empowers people -- even those who would not normally become engaged in political activities or protests, similar to the ones from Egypt. Social media provides transparency into events. More importantly, he says, it gives people halfway around the world a sense of empathy for those going through the tribulations.

Boorstin pointed to an article written last fall in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell that says the type of weak ties on Twitter aren't that powerful, and Stone wrote a response in the Atlantic suggesting that little things make a big difference. When Boorstin asked Stone to describe the effects of the weak ties related to Egypt, he said the strength of weak ties shouldn't be overlooked.

"To just to address this ridiculous non-argument, Gladwell said sending out a tweet is not the same as the entire civil rights movement of the 1960s," Stone said. "Yea, right, no shit. ... No one ever said that. ... What we're saying is no matter what the situation, you need to communicate with others to do activism and have your voice be heard, whether it's telephones during the fall of the Berlin Wall or social media in the Middle East."

It's about gravitating toward tools that allow people to communicate with others. Twitter has a role in social change, but company execs would never argue that sending out one tweet is equivalent to life-threatening civil disobedience.

The future for Twitter resides in mobile and a real-time information network that extends out past strong cellular signals, Stone said.