17 Comments

1. Imran Hussain Says:
   July 29th, 2008 at 12:04 pm

   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!

2. Alex Williams Says:
   July 29th, 2008 at 12:13 pm

   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.

3. Robert Scoble Says:
   July 29th, 2008 at 12:19 pm

   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.

4. Steve Lynch Says:
   July 29th, 2008 at 12:22 pm

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

5. Robert Scoble Says:
   July 29th, 2008 at 12:28 pm

   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.

6. Rod Trent Says:
   July 29th, 2008 at 12:33 pm

   Who is “we all”?

7. Robert Scoble Says:
   July 29th, 2008 at 12:34 pm

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

8. Mark Jaquith Says:
   July 29th, 2008 at 12:45 pm

   Funny to see scalable and Twitter in the same sentence.

9. Susan Kitchens Says:
   July 29th, 2008 at 1:05 pm

   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/

10. Susan Kitchens Says:
    July 29th, 2008 at 1:17 pm

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

11. Carlos Says:
    July 29th, 2008 at 4:14 pm

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

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

12. tweetip Says:
    July 29th, 2008 at 5:00 pm

    1st tweets
    Timeline ~ http://tweetip.us/lka98
    Chart ~ http://tweetip.us/lkutx

13. Ontario Emperor Says:
    July 29th, 2008 at 5:00 pm

    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.

14. Ontario Emperor Says:
    July 29th, 2008 at 5:02 pm

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

15. Ontario Emperor Says:
    July 29th, 2008 at 5:06 pm

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

16. g2-6b9dd8ab10f3a4d211b1d957dc71a019 Says:
    July 29th, 2008 at 8:59 pm

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

17. tweetip Says:
    August 9th, 2008 at 2:42 pm

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

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