Twitter is busting at the seams with news about the earthquake that hit the southwestern province of Sichuan in China today. And once again, the popular micro-blogging platform seems to have beaten everyone to the punch for providing breaking news, links and photos about the event.
Robert Scoble tweeted heavily about the quake and has just posted a timeline of the first Tweets available after the quake.
Earlier this week, I blogged about the lightening fast bits of information that come from Twitter on a daily basis. I’ve also mentioned following big tech guys like Scoble for exactly this reason.
I couldn’t find any information about the quake earlier today. As it turns out, Scoble was on the front-line today, providing information as it came in from Twitter users throughout China. Interestingly enough, @reutersindia and @thenytimes also had breaking news via Twitter feeds before the news was released in the mass media.
I remain convinced that Twitter is one of the fastest ways to obtain information on the web. How accurate the information is remains to be seen as it raises questions of how reliable eye-witness and first-hand reports in place of traditional means of media coverage.
Rory Cellan-Jones at BBC News dot.life reports:
“When I logged on to my desktop Twitter application (sad, I know) it was alive with Tweets about the earthquake in China. Most of them were from the celebrated technology blogger Robert Scoble, who is famous, perhaps notorious, for receiving a Twitter message every second of the day.
He is based in California, but thousands of miles away from the quake he was providing breaking news about it, linking to sites like the BBC and the New York Times, even providing a first picture – though how authentic that is remains to be seen. He now claims that Twitter had the breaking news even before the United States Geological Survey, which provides early warnings of seismic events.”
sorry to break the mood, but according to a comment left on this article http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2008/05/twitter_and_the_china_earthqua.html MSN and Rueters had already released the story. as for me, i didn’t see a single mention of it. in fact i didn’t know about the earthquake until late in the evening. Scoble twittered on it an hour after it occurred. that’s not very real-time.
once again, this belongs in the realm of digg, where it’s nothing about the news or the content, it’s about getting numbers and being famous. alas, the potential is lost due to human ambition.
Agree with Michael. You want fast info but more importantly it needs to be accurate and useful, which is why I prefer sources like BBC Breaking on Twitter.
http://twitter.com/bbcbreaking
Hey hey MJ! You’re not breaking any mood! You know I love it when you stop by and comment. You always give me pause for thinking.
Naruwan, thanks for your input as well.
The fact still remains that for a large number of people around the world, this news came first via Twitter. I didn’t hear about it first from other news sources, I heard about it from friends on a social networking platform yesterday afternoon while at work. I know. For shame. Messing around with Twitter at work.
Twitter is powerful stuff and it amazes me how much information I receive from it. I guess it isn’t so important WHO reported first, but I do stop to consider where the news came from first.
As I mentioned above, whether the information is accurate or not remains to be seen. I also think it’s really interesting that The NY Times, Reuters and BBC were all reporting on the quake on Twitter before the information was released elsewhere.
The person who left that comment in the afore-mentioned article has admitted he was wrong and was provided with links that show the time line as being correct. I think MJ also made a interesting point about numbers, followers and human ambition, but as bloggers, aren’t we all about these same things?
[...] 3. Third entry today goes to another member of my blog roll (right hand column, list of other blogs I read). Meet Carrie. This first post talks about her experience with Twitter. This second provides an account of how Twitter helped break the Chinese earthquake story. [...]