Twitter Shows Its Strengths As Earthquake Strikes China

 
photo credit: seektan 

Twitter is finally coming of age, and is demonstrating why the microblogging medium is fast catching up to be the fastest news breaker in the world. Something like 7 hours back a huge earthquake struck in China. The earthquake measured 7.8 on the richter scale and thousands have been feared to be dead. The epicenter was 50 miles from Chengdu, which has about 10.5 million residents. 

Robert Scoble a noted tech blogger and a Twitter addict first broke out the news on Twitter, even before the news could reach BBC. I was in college when I first received the alert via a text message. When I logged onto the internet the Twitterverse was completely busy with reports of the earthquake.

I won’t really go into much details as to what happened on Twitter this afternoon, but I’d like you to point you to sites that have covered this in detail.

• Online Journalism Blog has a lot more details about what happened on Twitter tonight. The Frontline blog has even more.
• Global Voices Online has links to videos and other Twitter and blog reports.
• Here’s a timeline of what first Tweets looked like.

News continues to fly in by the second, and I wonder if Twitter is slowly going mainstream. By their own admission BBC agrees that it was Robert Scoble who broke out the story first sitting thousands of miles away from China.

“Twitter comes of age as a platform which can bring faster coverage of a major news event than traditional media,”

That moment surely came a while ago, with Californian fires, more earthquakes, explosions and many other things. This is probably the first one that is gaining mainstream attention from news outlets like BBC etc…

As Twitter continues to battle its scaling problems, incidents such as this surely put Twitter in a position wherein everyone in the world can benefit from it. I know the investors behind Twitter are looking to make money from the service, but the social value derived from the service far undermines the economic value.

I think that “who’s first” is not exactly the point: “how fast, how many”, and “how open” for the spontaneous collaboration is much more interesting than who broke the story first.

We’re are going to see more of Twitter in the Twitter in the coming days. Here’s to hoping to that things go back to normal in China and may the god help the ones in need. I’m waiting for an official channel through which I can donate for relief purposes. Please let me know if you come across it.

To see the story unfold on Twitter visit Tweetscan. Do you think Twitter is slowly going mainstream and is ready to take on traditional media outlets like Reuters, BBC etc..

For more details on the earthquake visit NYTimes.