Comments on: LA Earthquake: Twitter Reports First – Again. Fake Video Caught.

By: USGS Now Embraces Twitter as Source of Earthquake Information | CloudAve

USGS Now Embraces Twitter as Source of Earthquake Information | CloudAve — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:48:26 +0000

[...] Not that it was a surprise, we’ve seen Twitter become the primary initial news source be it earthquakes, fires, military coups…etc. (For a while Google thought I was some earthquake expert simply because I pointed out Twitter was the first to report quakes in Japan and China.) But clearly, not all information on Twitter is reliable, as was the case of the fake LA earthquake video. [...]

By: Chirag Mehta

Chirag Mehta — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 00:57:45 +0000

I have a follow up post on my blog that I have pasted here without HTML formatting:

http://cloudcomputing.blogspot.com/2008/08/social-computing-in-enterprise-software.html

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Twitter was buzzing with posts on the recent L.A earthquake nine minutes before AP officially broke the news. This Twitter phenomenon once again proved that unintended consequences are always larger than intended consequences. As we would have never imagined people find amusing ways of using Twitter ranging from keeping buddies updated and getting caught drinking when they called in sick and the boss followed their tweets to ensue wave of media coverage to get out of jail. A recent proposal to use Twitter as an emergency system met with stark criticism citing Twitter’s availability issues. I don’t see this as an “either or” proposition. The answer is “and” and not “yes, but”. Let’s use Twitter for what it is worth. It’s a great microblogging and crowdsourcing tool to tap into the wisdom of crowd with a very little overhead and almost no barrier to entry.

Enterprise software should seriously consider this social computing phenomenon and leverage its capabilities by integrating such a tool in their offerings. For instance a social CRM application can use such a tool to help sales people effectively follow, collaborate, and close opportunities. The customer support system can provide transparency into the defect resolution process by service representatives tweeting the progress instead of logging it in semi-static IT ticket systems.

Following individual tweets has its obvious advantages but correlating multiple tweets could be extremely powerful and could yield to interesting nontraditional usage models such as using it to run predictive markets, sentiment analysis, or to track a recall on salmonella tainted tomatoes in real-time.
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By: Svetlana Gladkova

Svetlana Gladkova — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 06:53:02 +0000

Great summary: we have to stop praise Twitter for its ability to break news faster or to sympathize to AP because they can’t be as fast. We do need both – Twitter for breaking news and mainstream media for in-depth coverage. They do different job and they both do it well. And we in the tech blogosphere often forget that there are lots of people on Earth who still get their news in a traditional way – from TV or newspapers and have no idea of what Twitter is at all.

By: Zoli Erdos

Zoli Erdos — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 02:32:27 +0000

Jeremy,

I did not see that title on first viewing, and frankly, can’t tell if it was there originally. But you should listen to the voice-over:

“We’re *currently* experiencing an earthquake… the building’s swaying .. as you can see”

That’s as misleading as it gets, IMHO.

By: Jeremy Toeman

Jeremy Toeman — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 22:28:40 +0000

the video title used the word “recreation”… not exactly trying to hide it, were they?

By: tweetip

tweetip — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 22:27:21 +0000

1st tweets

Timeline ~ http://tweetip.us/lka98

Chart ~ http://tweetip.us/lkutx