

  SoCal earthquake a powerful reminder of Twitter’s potential - markbao
http://venturebeat.com/2008/07/29/socal-earthquake-a-powerful-reminder-of-twitters-potential/

======
staunch
I was in a skyscraper in downtown LA. Not fun to see the floor at an angle.
Not fun. Twitter was the last thing on my mind.

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anthonyrubin
I don't get it. Potential for what? Am I the only one that prefers depth and
accuracy over haste and inanity?

According the graph one source had information within a few minutes and the AP
had information in under 10 minutes. I'm sure anyone in the area knew
immediately without Twitter's help.

~~~
akd
Depth and accuracy? The first AP article isn't going to have anything except
"there was an earthquake." Perhaps they will have the Richter number. They
will definitely not have the epicenter or the damage/casualties. It may even
be less than 140 characters :)

~~~
tlrobinson
The quickest place you'll get the epicenter/magnitude from is USGS:

<http://quake.usgs.gov/recenteqs/>

You can sign up for SMS alerts too:

<https://sslearthquake.usgs.gov/ens/>

------
silencio
(I live in west LA)

First thing I did: grab the iPhone and run as fast as I can for the door
(given the damage done to the structure I live in during the 1994 northridge
earthquake, i don't trust it so much)

Second thing I did: Go on twitter.

That almost scares me :)

------
aneesh
I was woken up by an earthquake in Berkeley last year. I immediately ran to my
laptop, and checked the USGS .. it was there (magnitude/epicenter) within
seconds of me realizing it. Point being, for most news stories that Twitter
could break, there is a specialized source that already has it.

------
mattmaroon
If "fuck there was an earthquake" counts as news, then yes, Twitter is a great
source.

~~~
akd
Most major news sources' first release is just that, without the "fuck" and 20
minutes later.

~~~
mattmaroon
That's probably true. I guess definitely a subsection of news that Twitter
might be good for if you subscribe to a lot of people.

------
noonespecial
If indeed they ever get an early warning system like they've been promising
for years that gives a few minutes warning before large quakes hit, twitter
could be valuable. In addition to those great whackin' horns they blow for
emergencies.

Otherwise, I don't see much point in twittering "dude, there's an earthquake!"
All of the effected people will already know that.

 _SoCal earthquake a powerful reminder of Twitter’s potential_. How about a
powerful reminder of _nature's_ potential? Tweet.

------
rw
I predict that Twitter is going to face very serious competition. As useful as
their service is, it boils down to just being a centralized way to send size-
limited messages. An open Twitter could be like the internet, but with
restricted packet sizes, and everyone gets to sniff everybody else's traffic.

~~~
brandnewlow
Why doesn't Google just release a Twitter clone and be done with it?

~~~
nreece
Twitter can actually be a good acquisition for Google.

~~~
Hoff
Twitter reaches Beta?

------
anthonyrubin
Interesting online Q&A about today's earthquake and earthquakes in general:

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/discussion/2008...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/discussion/2008/07/29/DI2008072901719.html)

------
ivankirigin
My two cents: <http://twitter.com/tipjoy/statuses/871812474>

~~~
ojbyrne
For a while at digg we were touted for the same thing - a new way to
disseminate news more quickly than the mainstream media, but there was nothing
special that made us better at that than any other vanity-publishing mechanism
on the web (I'd guess technorati used the same type of marketing line before
us).

I'd say the same thing about twitter - it's only as good as it's own network
effect, there's nothing innovative that makes it better for this purpose than
any other service, and a lot of people are already leaving for other ego
broadcasting systems.

I think the service provided by the USGS should get most of the credit (and
its a reasonable bet that the technology is more interesting and a lot of
people worked a lot harder on it than on twitter). The article touts the
"epicenter maps" that people sent him. Twitter didn't produce those - and a
bunch of people pointing the author to them doesn't make them twitter-produced
news.

We weren't as quick to use it as marketing fodder as twitter though, that's
for sure:

<http://blog.twitter.com/2008/07/twitter-as-news-wire.html>

I find that kind of obnoxious. Not as obnoxious as if people had died, but
still obnoxious.

~~~
ivankirigin
The bigger digg gets, the less likely it is that news will immediately hit the
front page. The bigger twitter gets, the more likely it is that twitter will
be the first to report on breaking news. Plus the speed of that spread will
increase.

Think of it like 6-degrees of kevin bacon. With more people, the degrees to
hear about the news decreases. As news sites get built on top of twitter to
find these breaking stories, we might all be one or two degrees from the
original source. That is astoundingly fast and connected.

Of course the USGS is going to be the fastest - they have a computer hooked up
to a seismometer.

~~~
ojbyrne
Except that the bigger twitter gets the more noise there is, and the more
value there is in gaming it. For example, there's nothing to stop me from
twittering "earthquake in Canada" right now - you might unfollow me after
finding out it's not true, but others might echo it on down the chain.

Even more plausibly, I could have twittered that I was in a plane at LAX after
I saw the first twitter messages, even though I'm 3k miles away. How would you
know? I could probably give a vivid description of being in a just-landed
plane in the midst of an earthquake.

An example is that a journalist interviewed a woman who twittered that her OB-
GYN was in her vagina when the earthquake happened - it's a nice vivid detail,
but how do we know it's actually true?

~~~
ojbyrne
Case in point: [http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/08/01/how-janet-
fool...](http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/08/01/how-janet-fooled-the-
twittersphere-shes-the-voice-of-exxon-mobil/)

(Random twitterer pretends to be official spokesperson for Exxon)

