I noted with some interest Douglass Karr’s post on Twitter as a search engine last month. I don’t have enough contacts to receive the benefits he describes, but I found another raison d’etre for Twitter this morning. While drinking coffee and contemplating the best use of the hour before my kids awake, Something gently picked up my apartment and shook it. There was a rattle of dishes, and I could see my refrigerator wobbling to and fro. My 8 year old was roused from her bed by the shaking and of course wanted an explanation.


Now I said to myself, was that an Earthquake, or is some large piece of machinery being operated with somewhat less grace than is appropriate for 5:38AM. I didn’t hear any large diesel engines, so my first guess was Earthquake. But how to confirm? The Twitterverse has a cool feature called the Public Timeline which display the most recent pageful of posts. I say Cool because before today I would have been hard-press to call it Useful. Not Anymore! On that page, with it’s 10 second of so slice of time, I saw immediately that the tremor had been felt as far away as an unspecified city in Ohio, and in St. Louis.

This indicated to my non-geologist mind that the New Madrid Fault is in motion today. A major event along this fault has been one of the training scenarios for Civil Air Patrol and other agencies for some time now. But I digress..

Twitter is instant. Twitter is pervasive. Twitter is the stream of consciousness of the human race! The ability of Twitter to answer the question ‘Did you see that?’ on a grand scale is unparalleled. By the way, in the hour it’s taken for me to write this, CNN has published more info on the quake. Sorry, CNN, Twitter got the scoop!