For a while at digg we were touted for the same thing - a new way to disseminate news more quickly than the mainstream media, but there was nothing special that made us better at that than any other vanity-publishing mechanism on the web (I'd guess technorati used the same type of marketing line before us).
I'd say the same thing about twitter - it's only as good as it's own network effect, there's nothing innovative that makes it better for this purpose than any other service, and a lot of people are already leaving for other ego broadcasting systems.
I think the service provided by the USGS should get most of the credit (and its a reasonable bet that the technology is more interesting and a lot of people worked a lot harder on it than on twitter). The article touts the "epicenter maps" that people sent him. Twitter didn't produce those - and a bunch of people pointing the author to them doesn't make them twitter-produced news.
We weren't as quick to use it as marketing fodder as twitter though, that's for sure:
The bigger digg gets, the less likely it is that news will immediately hit the front page. The bigger twitter gets, the more likely it is that twitter will be the first to report on breaking news. Plus the speed of that spread will increase.
Think of it like 6-degrees of kevin bacon. With more people, the degrees to hear about the news decreases. As news sites get built on top of twitter to find these breaking stories, we might all be one or two degrees from the original source. That is astoundingly fast and connected.
Of course the USGS is going to be the fastest - they have a computer hooked up to a seismometer.
Except that the bigger twitter gets the more noise there is, and the more value there is in gaming it. For example, there's nothing to stop me from twittering "earthquake in Canada" right now - you might unfollow me after finding out it's not true, but others might echo it on down the chain.
Even more plausibly, I could have twittered that I was in a plane at LAX after I saw the first twitter messages, even though I'm 3k miles away. How would you know? I could probably give a vivid description of being in a just-landed plane in the midst of an earthquake.
An example is that a journalist interviewed a woman who twittered that her OB-GYN was in her vagina when the earthquake happened - it's a nice vivid detail, but how do we know it's actually true?
I'd say the same thing about twitter - it's only as good as it's own network effect, there's nothing innovative that makes it better for this purpose than any other service, and a lot of people are already leaving for other ego broadcasting systems.
I think the service provided by the USGS should get most of the credit (and its a reasonable bet that the technology is more interesting and a lot of people worked a lot harder on it than on twitter). The article touts the "epicenter maps" that people sent him. Twitter didn't produce those - and a bunch of people pointing the author to them doesn't make them twitter-produced news.
We weren't as quick to use it as marketing fodder as twitter though, that's for sure:
http://blog.twitter.com/2008/07/twitter-as-news-wire.html
I find that kind of obnoxious. Not as obnoxious as if people had died, but still obnoxious.