Earthquake hits Los Angeles : Twitter Celebs to the rescue.

Today morning, somtime after 5 AM, i was browsing the internet. I had twitter open, and some new tweets showed up. As usual I clicked the '2 new tweets', and there was Alyssa Milano's tweet "Earthquake.".
 
I suddenly checked out google news for any report of such an event, to find out where it had happened. But i could not find any information about such an earthquake. It was only about an hour later, news reports of the 5.9 scaled earthquake at Los Angeles started coming out.

Once again twitter has proved it strength by its quickness and wide reach. People from all over the world had known about the earthquake within minutes of the actual event. Thanks to the celebreties Alyssa Milano, Jordin Sparks, Wil Wheaton, Khloe Kardashian and Larry King and many others who thought of quickly sharing it with the people. With the twitter retweet feature, you couldnt even imagine the speed at which news is being spread.

This is not the first time twitter has come to the rescue in such situations. On 27th February this year, an 8.8 earthquake hit Chile (near Santiago). All means of direct contact, phone lines, power were all cut off. A woman (Sheryl Breuker) , who was trying to locate her sister-in-law, who was living in the quake affected area finally resorted to social media to locate her sister-in-law after all attempts of direct contact failed. Using twitter she sent messages to people in Chile using hashtags, and after a lot of retweeting, she was able to find out that her sister-in-law was safe in just 2 hours.
Read the first person account of Sheryl Breuker in her blog : Twitter – As powerful as an earthquake.
She will be ever grateful to twitter and social media.

A similar story occured on the 15th of April, when a meteor shower hit Wisconson, USA. News channels, took advantage of twitter asking people living in the locality for photos of the meteor shower.

These and many other stories tell us how valuable social media is in todays life. I hope this post will make people who think 'Internet and social media are such a waste of time' to think otherwise.

All hail TWITTER.  All hail Social Media.