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Sunday, April 26, 2009

Twitter, facebook, and real time info in the face of tragedy

I'm not going to spend alot of time talking about the Athens shooting tragedy (plenty elsewhere) but I do want to comment on one thing that I found interesting. Before most of the info hit the news, very accurate accounts were going up on twitter and facebook. Additionally, when the license plate number was released as part of the manhunt (personhunt?) effort, that info quickly went out on twitter. The local newspapers ONLINE did do a good job of getting info up (in spite of server overload issues); however, they could not beat twitter or fb in gathering that kind of info and getting it up quickly. True, there were a few false reports that went out via fb or twitter, but for the most part the information was amazingly accurate.

Very interesting and shows the true power of community networking I think.

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