Why Twitter May Matter in a Huge Way

I was on Twitter when a 6.0 to 6.5 earthquake hit Mexico City tonight.  This is a screen capture of Twitter messages from the quake zone.

Robert Scoble spotted the Twitter reports - Tweets - coming in with the quake news from Mexico City.  He put out his own Tweet:

Wow, earthquake in Mexico City. Felt by Twitterers.

 

 

 

 

 

Then, not unlike a news agency, he began to compile the information on Scobleizer:

Mexico City Earthquake, reported on Twitter first
How did I find out about the Mexico City Earthquake? On Twitter. As soon as people started reporting it on Twitter, I looked at the USGS maps. The Twitterers beat the USGS by several minutes. But now USGS Is reporting somewhere around a 5 to 6.0.

At the same time, Chris Pirillo of Gnomedex fame was broadcasting from his live web TV show as well as taking calls and hosting a chat room.  He sent out a Tweet asking for anyone from Mexico City to call in.  An English speaking Mexican got through on a video feed and provided an eyewitness account. We found out that power is out in some sections of the city and there's no  building damage or injuries in the vicinity of the caller. 

Twitter users around the world began to call in and Chris' show became a global conversation.


I'm doing my own scouting  - Letting Twitters know if I'm finding anything on news networks (and nothing was reported by CNN or the BBC for an hour after the first tremors); looking out for images that may be posted from the quake zone to flickr.  (During the London terrorist bombings, flickr users were taking and posting cameraphone pictures while they were sitting in bombed Underground trains.)

Community expert Nancy White read my Tweets as she was having breakfast in London.  She told a woman from New Zealand sitting nearby about the earthquake.

Wow.

Heady stuff, full of implications and possibilities. 

I'm thinking:

That this is Citizen Journalism 2.0, a mix of new web social networks and tools - Twitter, flickr - hooked in with blogs, webcast, chatrooms, video feeds, and mobile devices.   Two highly visible bloggers, Robert Scoble and Chris Pirillo, "anchored" the breaking news on their blog and web TV show.  Anyone who provided quake information on Twitter or through Chris' webcast served as correspondents, feeding the updates to these coordinating centers, these 'news agencies'.

That Twitter and jaiku, another application nearly identical to Twitter, may be a valuable tool for disaster relief and recovery.  What if we had these streams of incoming information from regular folks around the world before the Indonesian tsunami?  Could we have saved some people in Thailand, letting them know through Twitter and jaiku, that a major earthquake had occurred and a tsunami was headed in their direction?  The governments in the tsunami affected areas did not have a well coordinated warning system to do this, but now regular citizens have these web tools to initiate their own alert mechanisms.

Yes, my friends and I have been having a fun time with Twitter.  But it looks like we can do some good work with this great application, too.

Comments

[carmen]

Absolutely correct, Grace. We've been goofing around, but the potential is there for something really amazing.

[dorothy]

I think in an age of disappointing governments and overly PC news organizations, it may be time for the people to start protecting their own.

Great job, Grace. Good reporting!

[Ryan]

It was a trip watching Pirillo geek out. Obviously the tech was more exciting to many than the earthquake, but once the tech becomes a basic tool rather than a novelty, the story will again be front and center. Great stuff.

I uploaded a longer, more complete video of Pirillo connecting with Eduardo in Mexico City. Note the chat comments.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4502606569188610270&hl=en

[Beth B.]

Thanks for putting it all together. Wow, citizen journalism 2.0 - no spin needed.

[GraceD]

Carmen - still, we shouldn't stop "goofing" around, dollin!

Dorothy - "reporting"? This journalism student thanks you.

Ryan - many, many thanks for capturing all of this on video. You provided excellent documentation for demos on how to harness these tools and coordinate the info.

[Stan]

For what it's worth, the USGS is getting better, but it still takes them something like 20 minutes to get out notice for a large non-US earthquake.

The earthquake was at 05:42 UTC. I got my first notice of it from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii at 05:53 UTC. The official notice from the National Earthquake Information Center came in at 06:04 UTC.

Part of the delay is that NEIC prefers not to send out notices until a seismologist has looked at the event and verified the magnitude.