Twitter: Faster than a speeding earthquake

supertwitter

How fast is Twitter? On March 30th, news of a minor earthquake in Morgan Hill, California traveled faster on Twitter than the seismic waves it created. In fact, so many people got the word out at once the word “earthquake” rose to the top of the trending topics list on Twitter. At Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, 60 miles south of Morgan Hill, they were monitoring their trending topics search and saw this happen in real time. Several seconds later the building began to shake. That’s beyond amazing.

I’ve been talking for some time now about how Twitter is shamefuly misunderstood. It’s easy to understand why some people don’t get Twitter since even the people at Twitter didn’t even realize what they’ve created up until recently. There are millions of practical uses for this technology, and finally Twitter is beginning to realize a small fraction of what Twitter can be used for. Right now they are working on more robust search tools that will allow Twitter to search not only itself — but the pages people link to from their Tweets. Now that’s some earth shaking news.

One Comment

  1. Jamie
    May 8, 2009

    Even though I think it’s odd that people took the time out of the earthquake to “tweet”, it is really awesome that something so small like Twitter could have such a large impact. I see lots of good uses for this type of technology in the future!