I don't get it. Potential for what? Am I the only one that prefers depth and accuracy over haste and inanity?
According the graph one source had information within a few minutes and the AP had information in under 10 minutes. I'm sure anyone in the area knew immediately without Twitter's help.
Depth and accuracy? The first AP article isn't going to have anything except "there was an earthquake." Perhaps they will have the Richter number. They will definitely not have the epicenter or the damage/casualties. It may even be less than 140 characters :)
First thing I did: grab the iPhone and run as fast as I can for the door (given the damage done to the structure I live in during the 1994 northridge earthquake, i don't trust it so much)
I was woken up by an earthquake in Berkeley last year. I immediately ran to my laptop, and checked the USGS .. it was there (magnitude/epicenter) within seconds of me realizing it. Point being, for most news stories that Twitter could break, there is a specialized source that already has it.
If indeed they ever get an early warning system like they've been promising for years that gives a few minutes warning before large quakes hit, twitter could be valuable. In addition to those great whackin' horns they blow for emergencies.
Otherwise, I don't see much point in twittering "dude, there's an earthquake!" All of the effected people will already know that.
SoCal earthquake a powerful reminder of Twitter’s potential. How about a powerful reminder of nature's potential? Tweet.
I predict that Twitter is going to face very serious competition. As useful as their service is, it boils down to just being a centralized way to send size-limited messages. An open Twitter could be like the internet, but with restricted packet sizes, and everyone gets to sniff everybody else's traffic.
For a while at digg we were touted for the same thing - a new way to disseminate news more quickly than the mainstream media, but there was nothing special that made us better at that than any other vanity-publishing mechanism on the web (I'd guess technorati used the same type of marketing line before us).
I'd say the same thing about twitter - it's only as good as it's own network effect, there's nothing innovative that makes it better for this purpose than any other service, and a lot of people are already leaving for other ego broadcasting systems.
I think the service provided by the USGS should get most of the credit (and its a reasonable bet that the technology is more interesting and a lot of people worked a lot harder on it than on twitter). The article touts the "epicenter maps" that people sent him. Twitter didn't produce those - and a bunch of people pointing the author to them doesn't make them twitter-produced news.
We weren't as quick to use it as marketing fodder as twitter though, that's for sure:
The bigger digg gets, the less likely it is that news will immediately hit the front page. The bigger twitter gets, the more likely it is that twitter will be the first to report on breaking news. Plus the speed of that spread will increase.
Think of it like 6-degrees of kevin bacon. With more people, the degrees to hear about the news decreases. As news sites get built on top of twitter to find these breaking stories, we might all be one or two degrees from the original source. That is astoundingly fast and connected.
Of course the USGS is going to be the fastest - they have a computer hooked up to a seismometer.
Except that the bigger twitter gets the more noise there is, and the more value there is in gaming it. For example, there's nothing to stop me from twittering "earthquake in Canada" right now - you might unfollow me after finding out it's not true, but others might echo it on down the chain.
Even more plausibly, I could have twittered that I was in a plane at LAX after I saw the first twitter messages, even though I'm 3k miles away. How would you know? I could probably give a vivid description of being in a just-landed plane in the midst of an earthquake.
An example is that a journalist interviewed a woman who twittered that her OB-GYN was in her vagina when the earthquake happened - it's a nice vivid detail, but how do we know it's actually true?
