Twitter is still in its infancy stages of growth.  People are still discovering it; and a new way to utilize Twitter pops up daily.  The most recent newly discovered function for me is Twitter as a media source.  The AP is quick in releasing breaking stories from the scene of the news all the way to getting stories written, but there is lag time.  The news needs to be released, read, written about, edited, then publish on the web.  Although the internet allows for this process to happen quickly, it still takes sometime before a story breaks.  And you are also dealing with the biased opinions of the writers and editors (even with blogs).

Twitter has become the public AP wire.  The perfect example is when the Greater Los Angeles Area had a mild earthquake a couple days ago.  I was standing in my kitchen when I noticed my equilibrium seemed to be off.  An earthquake had just happened.  It was so mild, I had to ponder whether it had really just happened or I just imagined it.  A person in the room confirmed that they thought they felt something too.  The only way to confirm…the internet.  So I got on the web Googling ‘Los Angeles earthquake’.  The results I got back were of past earthquakes that had been written about.  Being that it was only moments after the quake, not even the earthquake sites had posted anything about it.

That’s when I thought, “I wonder if anyone is tweeting about it?”  To my amazement, the Twitter search turned up hundreds of results.  People tweeting about feeling it, speculating on the size of the quake, speculating on the epicenter.  If you were to go through every tweet the search brought up, one could probably come up with a pretty good guess on where the epicenter was.  Why?  The closer to the epicenter you got (Inglewood) the more people from that area had felt it.  Quite a phenomenon.  The earthquake sites, which are pretty quick in posting data, may have had postings on the quake up in 5 minutes at the quickest, but Twitters had postings on the quake up in seconds.

I think as Twitter continues to grow and more and more people join, you will see this trend to continue.  From sporting events (Did you see that shot?), concert events (So and so is a guest performer!!), car chases, natural disasters, and celeb gossip, the Tweeters will be the first on the scene and the first to report.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we see Google moving in and buying Twitter to add to it’s empire.  The site everyone was, at first, figuring out, is now slowly becoming a worldwide phenomenon.