In what is quite possibly the most spot-on comment about Twitter that BoomTown has heard thus far, Harvard University Professor Jonathan Zittrain said:

“It is easy for Twitter feeds to be echoed everywhere else in the world. The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what make it so powerful.”

Zittrain was being quoted in a New York Times piece today about the use of Twitter by those protesting the election results in Iran, as other means of modern mass communications–such as email, Facebook and texting–got blocked.

In other words, Twitter is so simplistic and silly that it is a perfect digital tool to overthrow a government–which is kind of makes the trendy microblogging service the Forrest Gump of international relations.

Stupid is as stupid does, of course, but what it does illustrate quite smartly is that word of mouth–a concept as old as humanity–remains the most powerful way of distributing information.

While not always reliable, masses of people chattering away has always been the most fluid way in which news has been disseminated and received. Although much of that can be mundane and borderline idiotic, one cannot deny its impact.

What one can deny, though, is the hype that inevitably follows in the wake of every one of these breakthrough technologies like Twitter.

That’s a mistake, because it is how the tools are used by people, more than the tools themselves, that should be the focus.

Still, the media hyping of tech tools as savior is reliably annoying.

Television, of course, changed the presidential elections, as radio had before that.

And, more recently, weren’t mobile phone cameras critical in reporting the bombing in London’s Underground in 2005?

Or wasn’t Facebook key to protests in Burma in 2008?

And, even more profoundly, didn’t the simple fax machine get lauded during the uprising in China’s Tiananmen Square in Beijing as an heroic gadget?

Reported Time magazine in 1989:

“When word of the massacre in Tiananmen Square first reached the University of Michigan, the 250 Chinese students studying there jumped into action: they purchased a fax machine. Daily summaries of Western news accounts and photographs were faxed to universities, government offices, hospitals and businesses in major cities in China to provide an alternative to the government’s distorted press reports. The Chinese students traded fax numbers back home along the computer network that links them around the U.S. The fax brigades at Michigan were duplicated on many other campuses.”

Ironically, hardly anyone today uses a fax machine at all, having moved onto more effective methods of sending out critical news, data, pictures, updates and more.

Like Twitter today, which deserves this moment in the sun, to be sure, as long as it lasts.

Which it won’t, as people move onto the next way to do what they have always done, which is to connect.

As for tomorrow, who knows?

After all, digital life was, is and will always be like a box of chocolates–you never know what you’re gonna get.

Last Tuesday, at around 5 PM, Internet users across mainland China began reporting problems accessing popular social networking sites, such as Twitter.com, the Yahoo (YHOO)-owned photo-sharing site Flickr.com, and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Live.com, Bing.com and Hotmail. The sudden unavailability of these sites led many Internet users to suspect that they had been blocked due to sensitivities over the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on June 4. And on Wednesday, dozens of Chinese Web sites also announced that they would be closed for technical maintenance for several days.

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Many people have a false impression that the Chinese government fears the Internet. In fact, it is just the opposite.”

–Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang

If China wants to correct the “false impression” that it fears the Internet, ending its paranoid blocking of Web services would be a good place to start. This morning, Beijing extended the Great Firewall of China, restricting Internet access to Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail and Bing, among others. As confirmation of this, Herdict–a Harvard University site that monitors Internet accessibility–shows a spike in reports claiming that Twitter is inaccessible in China this morning.

The Wall Street Journal’s China Journal reports similarly.

The move–presumably part of the Chinese government’s efforts to censor media ahead of the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre this Thursday–was more an inevitability than anything else. Like YouTube and blogging services WordPress and Blogger, Twitter provides Chinese citizens with an outlet for dissent and self-expression, things for which the Chinese government has a profound distaste.

So, it comes as little surprise that the repressive government in Beijing has blocked it. It did the same thing to YouTube back in March.

“It’s just part of life here,” said Beijing-based Twitterer Kaiser Kuo. “If anything surprises me, it’s that it took them so long.” 

I have a request for comment in to Twitter and will update if/when I hear back.