It’s no surprise that social media is one of the fastest ways of spreading news- and none of these is faster than twitter, whose amazing potential for communication was displayed o the 23rd of August, when a magnitude 5.9 earthquake travelled from Virginia to New York. Apparently the news of the earthquake travelled faster than the earthquake itself, with residents in New York reading about the quake before they felt it. According to the social media site, within a minute of the earthquake there were about 40,000 earthquake-related tweets, and the maximum TPS (Tweets per second) hit about 5,500 (which was a higher rate than the death of Osama bin laden received).
Twitter have released this video reflecting its amazing potential as a medium for communication:
Apart from revealing just how important social media can be to individuals- whose first response on feeling a tremor was to share it with their followers, it reveals just how fast topics can come and go in the twitterverse- with the trending topics before the earthquake dropping off rapidly after the earthquake struck.
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