Earthquake!

Earlier today a 5.4-magnitude earthquake hit Los Angeles. (Read about it on CNN.) As soon as I heard, I went to Twitter Search to see what people were saying about it.

A massive number of tweets have been published about the earthquake, and I’m so late to look that even though I can see the last 5,000 “earthquake” posts, I still can’t get to the first one.

UPDATE: Twitter found the first post about the earthquake. Read it here.

Here are a few:

jrorci: Building swaying earthquake fun: 5.8 magnitude.
about 2 hours ago · View Tweet

dmillar: LA has an earthquake, and latimes.com is down
about 2 hours ago · View Tweet

jovialjacki: it’s interesting hearing about the LA earthquake from a few people on twitter well before the CNN breaking news email. hope everyone’s ok!
about 2 hours ago · View Tweet

talteregor: Just felt my first legitiment earthquake, downtown in a big office tower. Every thing seems fine.
about 2 hours ago · View Tweet

I never noticed on Twitter Search, when looking at the results, the page will update you with “More than 16 more results since you started searching. Refresh to see them.” In the minute I sat on the page, the number rose to 25, then 44. 56. 109.

To see the spike in “earthquake” mentions, look at this graph by Twist. It’s not quite up to date, but it should be interesting to watch. I wish Twitter advanced search or another trending application would let you narrow in on a time period shorter than a day.

UPDATE: Here’s a graph from the Twitter Blog that shows what happened in the minutes following the quake.

Posted in Micro-blogging, News |
Tagged with CNN, earthquake, los angeles, Twitter