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Twitter and the China earthquake

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 12 May 08, 08:31 GMT

I was beginning to think Twitter - the micro-blogging service that's all the rage amongst the technorati - was just another fad for people who want to share too much of their rather dull lives. Until this morning.

When I logged on to my desktop Twitter application (sad, I know) it was alive with Tweets about the earthquake in China. Most of them were from the celebrated technology blogger , who is famous, perhaps notorious, for receiving a Twitter message every second of the day.

He is based in California, but thousands of miles away from the quake he was providing breaking news about it, linking to sites like the and the , even providing a first picture - though how authentic that is remains to be seen. He now claims that Twitter had the breaking news even before the , which provides early warnings of seismic events.

Let's see, as this story unfolds, whether this is the moment when Twitter comes of age as a platform which can bring faster coverage of a major news event than traditional media, while allowing participants and onlookers to share their experiences.

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