When the ground started moving here in Southern California, the “tweets” on Twitter started flowing. And it didn’t take long for some online enthusiasts to begin crowing that the first quake reports from the Associated Press and CNN trailed by several minutes the first alerts from users of the micro-messaging service.
The VentureBeat website soon posted an article entitled “SoCal earthquake a powerful reminder of Twitter’s potential.”
What also got a lot of attention — and a featured mention in a C-Net story — was the string of messages posted by Verdell Wilson — a woman who claimed she was in the middle of a, uh, quite personal ob/gyn exam as the building began to shake. Here’s her string of postings from that moment on (and on).
One Twitter member who calls himself “lonelysandwich” did try to bring a little reality into the euphoria over the “Twitterati” beating the news reports: *”To be fair, if CNN could get away with …. EARTHQAKE!!!1! as the extent of its coverage, they’d likely have scooped … Twitter.” *
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