The 5.6 magnitude earthquake in the South Bay was followed immediately by many, many reports on Twitter. If the world had the same concentration of Twitter users, it’d be a great source of breaking news – but regrettably, only for large-scale events like ‘quakes.
Twitter as earthquake tracker
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One of the possible uses mentioned in this Technology Review article on Twitter (Reg Required) is as an emergency broadcasting system . . .
Sounds very Snowcrash-ish. But of course a bit of a techy-biased view. The people who have mobile phones and understand SMS and so on are probably the least at risk from these types of emergencies. The one time I twittered something interesting was a police chase on foot in San Francisco where an officer drew their gun and fell over right in front of me. But who’s going to pick up something isolated like that. Mass events are more interesting and pick-upable. Small ones perhaps after the fact if you could search twitter and other streams in a structured way… but then that misses part of the point.