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Avatar Posted By: DoshDosh 52 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://searchengineland.com)
Category: Other Social Media
Hey, I like Twitter, but this entire thing Robert Scoble started about how Twitter had news of the Chinese earthquake before the US Geological Survey seemed absurd. Did it really? As it turns out, probably so -- by about a minute. Reading some of the accounts, you'd get the impression Twitter seemed to alert the USGS to the news.
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from planetc1 52 days ago #
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Has me thinking about how quickly people could be alerted to events. Take the "arrested" example. As use progresses, I'd expect we will see an increasing number of stories that "broke" on Twitter.

from frymaster 52 days ago #
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I think everybody here did a great job -- the author, Scoble, Price. Smart, sensible people getting to the bottom of an interesting story.

My big take-away is what I call #twitterspeed - that instantaneous, high quality feedback generated by these super-connected global networks. Right now, the twittosphere is high-tech, high-IQ, high-income type people. Noboby wants to sully their username by starting false rumors/BS news. Will we still get the high-quality info once twitter gains mass acceptance?

Perhaps the quality of our specific networks will stay strong. Or perhaps we'll have moved onto the next communications breakthrough du jour. BTW, found your story via @thestalwart

from johnandrews 52 days ago #
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Uncle Joe was talking on the phone to Auntie Jane when the earthquake started. He noted, "what's that...?".

So now ATT can broadcast that "the ATT Information Network knew about earthquake minutes before twitter or the USGS Advanced Warning System"??

I appreciate the hobby watching earthquakes, and the interest in modern technology, and all that brotherhood shared between Danny and Scoble, but seriously, do we need to try and make this sound like it's an important tech discussion? Save it for the water cooler or wine bar conversation at a real conference, yes?

from dannysullivan 52 days ago #
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Funny, John -- I was thinking exactly the same thing about the phone after I read in the morning Daily Telegraph again how the news first spread by Twitter. Really? By Twitter, I thought -- like no one was on the phone? I remember talking to my mom on the phone during the SF 1989 earthquake as it happened. So I got the news pretty fast then.

And what about IM? No one was IMing when this happened? But thinking about it more, Twitter probably deserves credit for being the first "mass" media outlet where the news came out. It's a small mass, but it was a place where it could spread. An individual could have blogged it, of course -- but Twitter is damn fast.

And yeah, actually, it's important for a couple of reasons. For one thing, any time there's an earthquake, people are searching for news about it. That's why I referenced those past articles I've written on SEL -- because there's a search aspect to all this. Ask.com, for instance, has an excellent real-time earthquake reporting smart answer.

It's also an important marketing discussion. Seriously, if you run the USGS, you want a message going out that you're "behind" on earthquake reporting, when that's your job? I mean, it's not like anyone at the USGS is going to lose their jobs. But no, it doesn't make them look good (except for the local offices that I mentioned that let you get updates directly via Twitter). And that's important for any organization to consider -- if there's important news going on, do you want some joe twitterer to be breaking it, if it was the type of thing you'd break yourself?

It was interesting looking at the USGS alert page, to see how it had evolved. Years ago, they wouldn't have had a web site to report news. They got that, then they added email alerts. And yes, RSS feeds, which a few years ago many people didn't think were necessary. I'm pretty sure we'll see them add Twitter to the list in the coming months.

from javaun 51 days ago #
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I too was wondering if no one phoned to report the quake -- or screamed, sent smoke signals, or semaphore for that matter. I'm waiting to hear that Twitter is building shelter for refugees in Myanmar and that Twitter is also distributing food and medicine in Sichuan Province.

Sarcasm aside, I am over all the Twitter hype, and though I'm a big Scoble fan, when I see posts like that one I think it detracts from his credibility as a media visionary.


The quake probably did end up as a tweet before USGS got it. In addition to being a bureaucratic agency, USGS has to confirm and make sense of what it reports. It has a reputation and can't go willy-nilly throwing out 140 character outbursts without doing due diligence. So no, it doesn't surprise me that the "twittersphere" was alive with posts. But how valuable are those posts really? I'm guessing most of the posts were "OMG something is happening..." Even if you had anything valuable to share, you only had 140 characters, so good luck being articulate. That's not even touching the argument that Twitter is so cluttered and fragmented that anything potentially valuable is going to be buried; anytime something actually happens,  Twitter turns into the online version of a mass-panic, so you'll have even more tweets by people who also don't know what's going on. In that way, the lack of actionable information and chaos on Twitter probably ressembled the street-level frenzy in China.

I've been spending less and less time on Twitter and can say I'm better for it. It's a great tool for people who can afford to spend all day on it, and I'm glad some of you can, but I can't (if everyone spent all day on it, our world would grind to a halt). If something remarkable happens, I know you guys will hash it out and put the conversation together in a coherent blog post so that I don't have to read 600 tweets to get the 2 pieces of valuable information out of it.

There is a lot of fascinating interaction and communication going on in the Twitter community, and that there is an exciting future for this kind of on-everywhere short communication, I also don't believe that Twitter is the company to take it to the next level. But that's another conversation about technology.

from johnandrews 51 days ago #
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I guess I'm too old to "get it" cause I just see it is a communications channel, not a media outlet. I see people twitter al sorts of stuff that is not true, meaningless, joke, or otherwise non-information.

It's broadcast, yes, but that's more a side effect of technology than anything else. I don't think I know a single app less directed than twitter - it was built with no purpose except to exploit a technological ability.

There have been emergency response/citizen media networks that aggregate various communications channels and sort them... I suppose they'll start including twitter to include the keyboard happy observers. I suppose if we took one of those systems and gave it a clever name we could credit it with all sorts of achievements for "knowing first". If the HAM radio guys were into PR I suppose we'd constantly hear about how they communicated news first, before any one else....

As for peple looking for news about an earthquake and finding it on twitter.... yeah ok if twitter is indexed or otherwise reaches the people who are looking for that news, that might be news, but I didn't read that "people hit twitter to learn about the earthquake before it was news anywhere else" I simply read about a guy who watched the USGS site and logged every minute from time zero as someone twittered him from China and the USGS posted the seismic reports.

I'll chalk it up as a slow news day, and remind myself that my own typing of this silly response is indicative of me, too, having a slow work morning, which isn't true, so I must get back to the matters that matter.

from dannysullivan 51 days ago #
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Heh -- hating on the Twitter, John :)

So to be clear, I didn't write that twitter was the best thing since sliced bread and thank goodness we had it or we'd have never heard about the earthquake. In fact, I was pretty annoyed that I kept seeing everyone parrot how if it weren't for twitter, we'd have been so behind on the news. The reality is that the USGS does get things pretty fast -- and then the news agencies start revving up. I think news reports starting hitting within 30 minutes, if I remember some of what I read.

So I saw it as more debunking -- plus another way to educate that if you want to find out if you just had a quake, there are ways you can do it far more efficiently than hoping it will flow through Twitter. The folks in Reno have been going through this a lot, where they have had all these shakes and are trying to figure out how big and where. And since these are relatively small in nature, they're not going to hit the news wires all the tie.

In terms of what type of outlet Twitter is, I don't think it fits into any particular metaphor. It's what you want to make of it and what you decide to get out of it. Yes, it's a communcations channel even of the ham radio style, if you're talking occasionally for fun to a few people who care. But you bet, it's a media outlet. Go find me blogs that have 25,000 subscribers. Plenty of them have fewer but get attention.

Scoble, attention lover and hypemaster he might be, has built a popular microblog channel with Twitter. And other people have as well. Perhaps it really will all go poof. But me, I think it actually has legs and once that online marketers probably need to understand more, pay attention to and figure out what to do with it for their own needs.

from Winooski 51 days ago #
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@javaun wrote: "I'm waiting to hear that Twitter is building shelter for refugees in Myanmar and that Twitter is also distributing food and medicine in Sichuan Province."

Hear, hear. I understand that we're all new media marketers, so it behooves us to assess the degree to which new channels are worth putting resources into, but I have to say I'm disappointed by anyone for whom the  speed of the communications channel, however you measure it, is more important than the need to process, analyze, and respond to the information.

I hope we can all take a moment from our beyond-busy, attention-deficit-inducing, overmediated techno-realities to consider whether we're currently putting enough time into *thinking* about what any particular new story means, what we can do about it, and whether we should try.

(And yes, I do Twitter...)

from javaun 51 days ago #
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Thanks @Winooski. That was very clear-headed of you.

When I responded on Scoble's blog, I caveated my remarks by saying I'm a big Twitter skeptic. I probably should've also added here I quit drinking coffee today so I'm a bit edgier than usual.

from johnandrews 41 days ago #
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"hating on the twitter"

Gee Danny, it's that attitude that turns me off the most about the groups hanging together at SMX and other places... if something is contrary, call it "hating". If someone isn't going along, point them out as "negative". Why such an ugly response to expressed disappointment or concern? If you don't know what I'm talking about, just re-read your comment with that one little hater line removed. Was your commentary not strong enough, you needed to add that?

As I said right at the start... the observations are important, but maybe not search marketing news. But again.... participation in Sphinn s rewarded with these kinds of responses, from the leadership no less. Where's Jill? Should I go get Doug? I'm confident I don't need to ping Rand...


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