Waterspouts And Twitter

Much has been made in the political press about the power of Twitter, especially when it comes to the ongoing turmoil in Iran. Following several Iranians on Twitter has been both thrilling and tragic, but the service as a tool for quickly disseminating information is fantastic. This past Friday I found out first hand how effective it can be even on a local level. As I sat here on the south side of Jacksonville not far from the St. Johns County line, routine but strong thunderstorms passed over us with just some swaying trees and roadsigns. Not long after this a local Twitter feed for local politics re-tweeted a picture of a funnel cloud not far from my Father’s office in Downtown Jacksonville. Immediately several local twitter feeds that I follow, and some friends feeds all started erupting with first hand accounts of multiple waterspouts roaming through different parts of the city. Jacksonville has a combined city and county government so the area between these events was vast comparatively. Then I received a picture of a waterspout not far from my Mother’s office not far from interstate 95 on the southside. Now this is all before any local news websites were reporting the event. But to have such a flow of information showed that Twitter can be more than just the next annoying social networking trend, but something of use.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 8:30 am and is filed under Random Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.