Earthquake Twitter

So how long did it take you to hear about the earthquake in LA yesterday? I heard around noon time on NPR and immediately hit the New York Times web site for some more information and texted Matt at work. While I was waiting for the page to load a bit of worry began to buzz within me as Monica, Matt's sister, is in LA. There was no information on the nytimes web site yet so I set of on a google hunt to see what I could learn. Quickly I hit upon twitter and the hundreds of messages pouring in about the earthquake. I quickly learned through the hundreds of tweets that the earthquake though it lasted a long time it wasn't that bad.

A quick review for all you out there Twitter is like a micro blog. Users sign up and blog by text message. The Tweets (what the postings are called) are short and succinct. You can follow people on twitter and it's generally used answer the question "What are you doing right now?". The neat things about twitter that you can see what word is most often being used in all the twitters being submitted and watch a stream of any tweets coming through with that keyword.

The tweets on the earthquake began seconds after the earthquake occurred. It took the AP about 10 minutes to put out a short blurb on the news wires. I stayed on twitter to see what the progression on messages would be. There were some general trends evident in the messages. For about the first half hour or so after the earthquake the messages were along the lines of "OMG! Earthquake!" then they were followed by messages from LA along the lines of "I'm ok. Earthquake not that bad" and at this time also messages to people in LA with well wishes "shout out to my LA peeps hope you're ok". The I'm ok messages went on for about another hour or so and then came the sometime hilarious: what was I doing during the Earthquake messages. My favorite was of a woman who was at the OBGYN and in the middle of an exam when the earth shook.

Right now twitter is an entertainment tool and clearly not a "newswire" or true communication tool. Just the same my thoughts on the phenomenon is "How cool is that!" instant word from the people on the ground telling the world what's happening. Other news sources saw the usefulness of twitter during the earthquake and I began to see Opinion Editorials commenting on Twittier and what it's existence could mean for the dissemination of news. As if on cue as soon as those OpEds were posted Twitter's website crashed.