The Earth’s Plates Weren't All I Felt Shifting

Last week, I took my family on a vacation in Italy. We were asleep in our hotel in Rome when the earthquake struck in Abruzzo.

While the area of the worst destruction was about 60 miles away, the force of the quake was enough to wake us at 3:30 am. Once our room stopped shaking (which seemed a lot longer than the 30 seconds it actually lasted), my first impulse was to turn on the TV. There was nothing about it yet on the news. My next impulse was to grab my BlackBerry and check search.twitter.com

I entered “earthquake” and “Rome” and lo and behold there already were dozens of Tweets, mostly of the “Did you just feel that?” variety. But by the time the story hit the web and TV, it had already started coming together through the Tweets.

With Twitter, we can now report and read about news in real time.

The change is seismic.

-Mark