Who was the first to report on the China earthquake of May, 2008? I will give you a hint: it wasn't the mainstream media.

Twitter users in China began reporting the devastation on Twitter at least a half-hour before the Chinese government prepared its semi-official (and largely incorrect) report. While the media was still scrambling, and even before the U.S. Geological Service (USGS) - the world's premier earthquake monitoring system - had a handle on the problem, Twitterers in China were delivering text, maps, graphs and even video over the Internet in real time.

The same phenomenon occurred when a 5.4-magnitude quake struck Los Angeles on July 29. Twitterers were on top of it, literally, delivering real-time reports in the form of "tweets" to their followers. Twitter users also kept each other posted on fire spread during the June, 2008 California wildfires.

In an era when catastrophic environmental events like the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989 occur on a more or less regular basis, Twittering - a social engine gone viral - enables the kind of first response the government can only dream of (and would do well to emulate).

Imagine, for example, a train wreck in which cars carrying a toxic chemical tip over and spill into a waterway like the St. Lawrence Seaway, which runs between Canada and the United States and feeds the Great Lakes. This area, inhabited by roughly 34 million people and innumerable species of wildlife, including aquatic varieties, would be ravaged.

Designated first responders, from the governments of both nations, would be hours - perhaps days - in arriving, as was the case in Hurricane Katrina. Using tweets instead of formal communications, however, those first responders closest to the scene with the appropriate spill-remediation equipment could begin the process of cleanup before such chemicals have a chance to spread.

So what is Twitter? It is a social networking and micro-blogging site accessible through the Twitter website, a mobile phone, a computer or even an iPod. In fact, any electronic device which can send and receive signals can Twitter.

Twitter, once charged with being nothing more than a gossip site, is coming into its own. The "fail whale", once used to advise Twitterers of a system failure, is becoming extinct as network improvements during the summer of 2008 expanded the system to match a growing user base, and several third-party entities now offer updates via the Twitter interface. Twitter even has its own underground, and these TUBS allow users to meet in real life.

Sending tweets of 140 characters or less, people who "follow" each other (the Facebook equivalent of friends) can keep up-to-date on each other's activities - everything from a new hobby to a new member of the family. Reporters and journalists can send alerts on their newest articles via ReporTwitters. Corporate CEOs can get short updates on the possibility of a hostile takeover, and Twitter users can find each other using Google maps. This last - Twittermapping - would be ideal in the event of a natural disaster or environmental threat (for a full list of Twitter terms, visit the Twitter glossary).

Twitter has also been used as a social justice tool, as witness the April, 2008 arrest of UC Berkeley graduate student James Buck, who was covering the government protests in Egypt. Used by many industries, universities and relief agencies like the American Red Cross, Twitter has also been identified by the US Army as a potential terrorist tool, even though a large number of government entities, and their members, Twitter regularly. It behooves me to observe that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

I once noted that the evolution of anything requires extraordinary circumstances, and the incredible range and interactivity of such electronic mediums as Twitter is surely an example. Expect evolution, in Twitter's case, to take a step toward immediate, worldwide intervention of behalf of both people and the planet.

Related Reading:
Ecology101: How to Engineer a Natural Disaster
Drilling the Cause of Mud Volcano Leaving 300,000 Homeless

Image Credit:
Julia Kao