As you all know I took a trip to the Newseum in DC recently. In what I think is their new media section I came across the infamous “tweet heard round the world”. I contacted Twitter to get more info and they responded quite quickly. Thank you Mr. Stone!
My email to Twitter:
I couldn’t help but notice your appearance in the Newseum in Washington DC. There is a mention of how Twitter beat out the multibillion dollar Bloomberg News Service by 22 seconds in reporting the May 12th earthquake in China this year.
- Introduce yourself
- How do you feel about being immortalized in this nation’s news museum?
- What was that experience like? Did they call you? Write you? Send a Tweet?
- Was the China incident a one-time thing or will Twitter continue to influence the future of news reporting?
Their response:
Hi Robert,
My name is Biz Stone and I’m the co-founder of Twitter. Yes, the Newseum folks emailed with a few questions about how Twitter works and I answered them. We’re happy to be included in the collection. The China incident is by no means isolated on Twitter.
Two weeks ago there was an earthquake in Southern California and Twitter started collecting first-hand reports the same minute the quake struck at 11:42am. Nine minutes later, the AP send out a wire. During those nine minutes, Twitter collected 3,436 updates from people on their way to work, school, the doctor, etc containing the word “quake.”
Later that week another quake struck China. There’s also floods, windstorms, Olympics, and any massively shared event you can imagine surfacing on Twitter in real time. Have a look at the trending topics at search.twitter.com to get an idea of how it works.
Because Twitter has a massive real-time feed of what people all over the planet are seeing, feeling, thinking, and doing we believe there are some interesting compliments to existing news services. We’re just now beginning to explore these opportunities.
Thanks,
Biz Stone, Co-founder
Twitter, Inc.
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