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Twitter Survives Earthquake
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by Jordan Yerman | July 30, 2008 at 12:13 pm
219 views | 10 Recommendations | 2 comments
When disaster strikes, utilites tend to fail. With mobile phones, this is particularly likely, as damage to infrastructure is also going to damage a few mobile phone antennae. In the case of yesterday's earthquake in Los Angeles, people had difficulty communicating via phone, so they turned to the unlikely lad: Twitter. Known for its disproportionate downtime, Twitter was the dark horse in the reliability race, but it pulled through.
"As soon as I got dressed, I twittered my experience from my cell phone," Wilson said. "I usually twitter to 80 friends, but I now have 274 messages from people commenting on it."
Twittering and texting may be the way to go in an emergency, given landline and cellular phone networks were heavily congested as callers jammed the lines, creating frustration for some users who had difficulty getting calls through.
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Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (2)
at 14:35 on July 30th, 2008
jordan, I like this story. It's good stuff.
This is what schools should do. Instead of calling our cells to make sure we haven't fallen into a crack the earthquake caused and fallen into the center of the earth along with all the monsters and hobbits colleges could just Twitter all of us to make sure we're OK.
at 14:46 on July 30th, 2008
It got annoying that people were just re-twittering the same news so it was nothing new after a while, but it is interesting that when the common form of communication breaks down, people turn to twitter before anything else.
It is like when James Karl Buck got thrown in Egyptian jail, he twittered about it and people came to his aid. Ah, the power of twitter...