Earthquake in Los Angeles

It’s a bit scary to know that even during an earthquake, people were tweeting about it, and not diving for safety. Even though it didn’t cause any damages, but it seems that people prioritize Twitter and FF over a lot of other things, that should come first!

You could argue that sending a tweet is actually beneficial to the public safety as it amplifies the notification. Using Twitter to navel gaze about an earthquake is a whole other sociological issue.

Imran: I’ve been in earthquakes, even ones much bigger than this. Your first impulse, after the shaking is over, is often to talk to other people about what you and they experienced or to check on what happened to family and friends. That’s why phone lines get tied up right after a quake. Twitter lets you do both in a scalable way.

But Robert, if you have a big enough earthquake in San Francisco, won’t Twitter and FriendFeed both go down?

Steve: not necessarily. In our last big earthquake cell phones and lights stayed on the whole time where I was. And, anyway, if those two go down we’ll still have Plurk and Identi.ca and Pownce.

Who is “we all”?

Rod: those of us on Twitter. Heheh. Yeah, I assume everyone who reads me is on Twitter. Bad assumption.

Funny to see scalable and Twitter in the same sentence.

I was troubleshooting a problem with a stereo mic… recording a test in audacity when the quake hit (I’m w/in oh, 10 – 15 miles of epicenter location), and so I’ve got a bit of growing ambient noise in recording. I was holding the mic, and I stood up to move to doorway and mic got disconnected, so the shake recording is pretty short (but duration was maybe 30 seconds from noise onset to the point that I walked back to computer from doorway to stop audacity recording.

Recording is here: http://www.2020hindsight.org/2008/07/29/quake-58-was-recording-a-mic-test-when-quake-hit/

BTW, you should also post searches for “quake” in addition to “earthquake”

“Twitter lets you do both in a scalable way.”

ROFL…you said “Twitter” and “scalable” in the same sentence. Seriously?

If you were mobile during the earthquake, FriendFeed might not have been an option. I’ve been locked out of fftogo for several hours now, apparently because of an issue with FriendFeed’s API.

My real problem, however, was with mobile phone voice/text service (in my case, Verizon); I wasn’t able to make or receive calls/texts for over an hour after the quake hit. Yet I was able to get to a mobile web browser and tweet.

If you were mobile during the earthquake, FriendFeed might not have been an option. I’ve been locked out of fftogo for several hours now, apparently because of an issue with FriendFeed’s API.

My real problem, however, was with mobile phone voice/text service (in my case, Verizon); I wasn’t able to make or receive calls/texts for over an hour after the quake hit. Yet I was able to get to a mobile web browser and tweet.

Random thought; it would be nice if Twitter or Summize provided the ability to filter search results by date/time range.

I meant, of course, FriendFeed or Summize. Oops.

You may tryout eQuake Alert plugin, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2239 (currently the data is fetched from USGS)

We revised our timeline screenshot, now ordered by our internal time… http://tweetip.us/lkr1g