USGS Develops Twitter-Based Earthquake Detection

sprinkletown writes "A team of seismologists at the US Geological Survey has found that Twitter is the fastest way to get information out of an earthquake area, especially in those less densely populated. Seeing the Twitter community as an untapped resource, the USGS has developed a new way to track earthquakes by clustering quake-centric tweets."

Comments

Twitter as a news search engine

[eihab]

I've used Twitter's search before (out of desperation) when my wife thought that we had an earth quake and I didn't.

To my surprise just 3 minutes later (time it took me to exhaust regular search engines), someone tweeted that they're having an earthquake a few miles away from where we live.

Since that day I've been using Twitter's search to find up to the minute updates for topics that interest me (Intel's SSD firmware bug, conferences, etc.).

I think Twitter is shaking up to be a very good source of news/information, if you can manage to find gems in the pile of "I just landed. WOOT!" tweets.

Thats a great idea

[MichaelSmith]

Twitter users can be repurposed as sensors for vibration, voltage and even temperature!