Twitter sees earth-shaking activity during SoCal quake

It has become almost cliché to say that Twitter users break news of natural disasters the minute they happen. But what about the minute before?

By most major media accounts, including the Associated Press and the LA Times, the 5.4-magnitude earthquake yesterday in Southern California happened at 11:42 a.m. But the first half-dozen tweets announcing the rumbling actually came in a minute earlier, according to Twitter's API data.

The man credited with breaking the news: Nicholas Hawkins, who wrote: "holy **** earthquake in so cal" (with the asterisks representing an unprintable yet understandable reaction to a temblor). The silver medal goes to Victor Hernandez, who was 18 seconds too late. Our findings even contradict that of Twitter itself, which listed the first quake-related message at 11:42 on its blog. Though it's possible that the minute discrepancy could be a server timing error, Twitter did not immediately respond to an email for comment.

Within the first hour, Twitter users seemed to cover...

every major angle of the quake. Coffeejunkie79 sounded off on the mobile mix up: "my cellphone won't connect since the earthquake." And David Accampo highlighted building structural concerns: "Guy in office picked great time to tell me that our office building isn't up to earthquake code."

The short messaging service became some people's go-to source for the news. Gstatton wrote, "twitter's crazy like that...found out about the earthquake in SoCal 1min after it happened." Andy Aldridge took a jab at major media, saying, "Once again, Twitter scoops big news media. This time it was the LA earthquake. Time to go check Flickr for first hand look at the damage."

Perhaps the biggest news, some said, was not the earthquake itself, but that Twitter managed to keep its servers running during the 6,736 first-hour "earthquake" tweets. Twitter users have become all too familiar with seeing the notorious whale image, signifying a "service down" error, so the fact that the site withstood the elements -- during which LATimes.com experienced a brief outage from its traffic surge -- was a surprise.

For a more in-depth look at the earth-rattling Twitter activity, check out our coverage yesterday including a live feed of messages containing "earthquake." We also have an interactive time line showing the first 12 hours of quake tweets (below). Scroll over the graph to see messages, and drag the sliders at the bottom to scale the time line.

-- Mark Milian

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Twitter visualizer by Sean Connelley / Los Angeles Times

Comments

[Steve Driscoll]

Me and my dogs (lterally two black labs) survived the rocking back and forth to disclose our experience on twitter! Great fun!

http://twitter.com/stevedriscoll

[Daniel]

Well, if you were at or near the epicenter(as I was), it figures someone online would post it as they were sitting at a computer or laptop--not a big brainer.
I myself,was headed of to class when it happened, though not at a computer at the time(I almost fell of my bed when it happened, thought the walls were caving in, though there was no damage to our house).
I also didn't have problems with my cell phone, neither did my sisters who called my mom and other sister while dropping of some mail at the post office (monitors swayed, windows buckled I heard, but post office employees told them to stay away from windows, and duck under desks.)
Not a big event, but certainly rattled nerves.
Classes though were canceled (summer session at Mt. San Antonio College; WWII era buildings, used to be a military hospital, though most were reinforced and some were fairly new buildings including the Sciences building in accordance with new codes, and some under construction, there were some that were red tagged or at least closed for a few days, noticeably the bookstore, that had books thrown off shelves, and some minor ceiling damage). I was bummed, it's finals week and we only have a few days in which to cram a lot of info before Thursday's tests.