Twitter as real-time news: The case of the US Airways plane crash on the Hudson River

As many of you know, a few hours ago, a US Airways plane landed safely on the Hudson River. CNN has live coverage, but even before they started covering it, everyone on Twitter started giving updates. A Summize search was updating between 330-550 tweets every 0.03 seconds. I am NOT kidding.

While some people may think of this as information overflow, I think of this as true crowd-sourced citizen journalism (like the awesome work that NowPublic.com does). Twitter-sourced citizen journalism.

No wonder why so many mainstream media folks are getting on Twitter. And local Vancouver people like Gillian Shaw and Jeff Lee from The Vancouver Sun, and Stephen Hui with The Georgia Straight (just a couple of examples, this listing is by no means exhaustive), are doing excellent work by “getting it” (e.g. understanding social media even if their day job is mainstream media).

Honestly, I am glad I am on Twitter. And I am even more glad that the passengers are safe. To the pilot of the US Airways Flight 1549 – YOU ROCK. You saved more than 150 lives today. And to the crew – you rock too!

[UPDATE - With all the search that has been occurring on Flickr for photos of the plane landing on water and the rescue, it occurred to me - how many people are going to upload photos to Flickr that weren't taken by them and how will those copyright violations or Creative Commons license violations be dealt with?]

[UPDATE - I failed to mention that one of the people who was helping the rescue, Janis Krums (@jkrums on Twitter) sent to TwitPic what is considered the very first photo of the plane floating on the Hudson River. Kudos to him! The true power of social media eh]

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