The Speed of Twitter

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My article from an old Media & Tech blog (August 26th 2011)

When Steve Jobs announced this past Wednesday evening that he was resigning as CEO of Apple, news spread like brushfire on the internet. I saw it first on Google News, but my Twitter Newsfeed was rolling about 100 tweets per handful of seconds.

One guy tweeted, in a seemingly blase way, that after a couple of hours, this groundbreaking report was old news. Stop tweeting about it, he said. This short period of time is equivalent to about two weeks in the Twitter universe.

One lady tweeted:

The speed of SM [social media] information is amazing! I like to see how long AFTER twitter a story’s posted on CNN.

Well, I’m sure the major networks have systems and procedures in place to tap social media and get on-the-spot, real-time reports from their viewers, readers, fans et al. Otherwise, their old ways of deploying reporters on the ground to cover big news would probably be too slow.

Then, just a few minutes ago, I find this tweet from TweetSmarter, with a link to a graph created by Eric Fischer. Have a look, and try to make sense of it, before reading further. 

The earthquake Mr. Fischer is referring to is the one that hit the US eastcoast on 23rd August. The graph basically says that just 60 seconds after the earthquake started, people started tweeting about it with location-tagged messages! Within just 120 seconds, hordes of people within 100 miles of the earthquake had tweeted about it. Over 10 minutes, yet more tweeters came forward from within 400 miles.

It’s an amazing set of statistics, and I don’t know if there is any physical mechanism for news reporting that can match the speed of Twitter!

How impressed are you?

Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!

Ron Villejo, PhD