Lessons Learned from Using Twitter to Track Quakes. And Tremblors. And Gempas.
BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, March 24 2010
Twitter 101 is that company's effort to demonstrate the best uses of their platform, including a growing stable of quickie case studies showing how businesses tweet. Twitter has published self-profiles, thus far, of companies like Best Buy, JetBlue, Etsy, and something called NAKEDPizza which turns out to be healthy pizza outpost launched in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. (Try as we might, there just didn't seem to be a way to insert an extra anchovies reference in there.)
Anyway, we digress. Exciting for us is that Twitter's latest company case study is actually a government one. Profiled is the U.S. Geological Survey, part of the Department of the Interior. (via Steven Lunceford on GovTwit) The earthquake experts in the federal government, USGS is well poised to make use of Twitter. It deals with real-time events where good information can be scarce. Here's how USGS describes how Twitter helps the agency do its job, not only in the United States, but recent earthquake hotspots like Indonesia and Chile:
The USGS's involvement in Twitter was not spontaneously initiated by one of our lab coat-adorned scientists. Instead, we are entering the fray slowly, simply by listening—listening to the thousands of "earthquake!", "gempa!", and "temblor!" tweets submitted by Twitter users throughout the world immediately following earthquakes.
These tweets begin seconds after the shaking hits and can be transmitted from regions where voice communication is slowed from heavy usage. In sparsely instrumented regions, they can be our first indication that an earthquake may have occurred.
The USGS is automatically gathering, summarizing, and mapping earthquake tweets to provide a rapid overview of what people experienced during an earthquake. Our Twitter-based application provides tweet counts for affected cities and lists the tweets generated immediately following the event.
USGS completes the loop with the Twitter world by posting maps of earthquake-related tweets back on @USGted, its Twitter Earthquake Detector Feed. As nice a taste as these mini "case studies" are, there's not all that much meat there. (For example, how, exactly, is USGS handling the translation of non-English tweets?) It'd be great if government shops like USGS posted more robust case studies that their allies in bureaucracy could learn from.