Tsunami brought on a wave of Tweets

IDG News Service - The news from Chile on Saturday morning, appearing on the Associated Press app on my iPhone as I read it half-asleep, was tragic but distant: An earthquake measuring 8.8 on the Richter scale had rocked central Chile and the capital city of Santiago, and dozens were already confirmed dead.

But it was already clear that the disaster was spreading across more than one-quarter of the world in the form of a tsunami. Though the quake had done more damage in Chile, the wave was traveling to nearly every shore on the Pacific Ocean.

It was the kind of moment that the Internet, especially Twitter, was made for. An event that would affect millions of people was developing in real time. Only the Internet had the range and scale to carry a collective conversation about it.

Online mainstream media outlets covered the immediate news and reported when the tsunami, traveling at the speed of an airliner, was forecast to hit various places. They showed useful graphics from official sources, such as a color-coded map from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of how the wave was expected to spread. Some TV stations in threatened areas streamed their news reports live.

From our apartment in San Francisco, we checked in on Hawaii, a favorite vacation spot and home to some of our loved ones. Parts of the state had been devastated by tsunamis in the past, and the islands were bracing for a major impact. We found several TV stations streaming their uninterrupted news coverage of warnings and evacuations and plugged them into a bigger screen. Over DSL (digital subscriber line), via Wi-Fi to an iMac, which was plugged into our HDTV, we spent the morning watching Hawaiian TV on our own TV. It was a bit more blurry when blown up to full screen, but perfectly watchable.

Then I looked beyond the formal news outlets and checked in with Twitter, entering the search term "tsunami." Every time I looked up at the TV for a minute or so and then back to my PC, there was a new update: "2,273 more tweets since you started searching." "2,413 more tweets since you started searching." Those were only the tweets that included "tsunami" in Roman characters. The term was "trending" as a common search term closely behind the leading word, "Chile." Thousands of people were experiencing the fear and anticipation together, their 140-character-or-less messages bouncing around the ocean as the unstoppable played out.

"Tsunami warnings in place across New Zealand's east coast. Might pay to stay away from the beach today," reelclever wrote.