Even as the ground was still shaking in the Chinese province of Sichuan during Monday’s devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake, California-based Robert Scoble was providing updates on the event through his Twitter account, prompting such illustrious news gathering organisations as the BBC to wonder whether the micro-blogging service might be more effective in bringing faster coverage to breaking news events.
According to a post on Scoble's regular blog, scobleizer.com, he beat all the major news agencies, and the US Geological Society, to the story because fellow Twitter users (twitterers? twits?) alerted him to it online.
“I reported the major quake to my followers on Twitter before the USGS Website had a report up and about an hour before CNN or major press started talking about it,” he writes. “How did I do that? Well, I was watching Twitter on Google Talk. Several people in China reported to me they felt the quake WHILE IT WAS GOING ON!”
Twitter is a micro-blogging service developed by a start-up company of the same name. It allows short messages of no less than 140 characters to be sent to people all over the globe. The system works by allowing users to "follow" other user's posts. Scoble, for example, has 23,370 followers, and follows 21,280 other twitter accounts.
“I was beginning to think Twitter - the micro-blogging service that's all the rage amongst the technorati - was just another fad for people who want to share too much of their rather dull lives. Until this morning,” writes Rory Cellan-Jones on the BBC's dot.life technology blog.
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