Twitter Spreads News Of U.S. Airways Crash In An Instant

Thursday was yet another indicator that Twitter is the way we’re going to consume breaking news in the future. I learned about the U.S. Airways Hudson River plane crash before it was on CNN.com, NYTimes.com, and FoxNews.com.

Twitter represents the power of people to communicate events in an instant. Silicon Alley Insider’s Dan Frommer was the first I saw to report news of the crash. I quickly checked all the major news sites and saw no coverage. Since I live in the NYC metro area, I ran into my living room and turned on the TV. News channel WNBC 4 in NYC was just interrupting local programming to report news of the crash.

Within minutes there were hundreds of Tweets about the crash, complete with pictures from eyewitnesses and even one person who was on a NYC ferry headed to the crash site to pick up passengers.

That’s amazing power, all thanks to the mobile phone and a social networking tool called Twitter. News spreads like wildfire when you can tell 100, 500, 1,000 people at once with a single Tweet.

Results are showing up faster than Twitter can keep up.

Expect to see more news breaking via Twitter rather than traditional media outlets.

by Eric Zeman

Full Story: http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2009/01/twitter_spreads.html?cid=nl_IWK_daily_H