Will The Twitter replace The Google?

Friday was a funny day.  I was chatting to my Daughter in Toronto when she suddenly went offline.  I received an email a short time later telling me the power had gone off in Toronto.  Well, it was a roundabout way of saying that.  But I put my search-fu to the test to find out what was going on.  I mean, I have found (and bookmarked) a range of services here in Queensland so that I usually know exactly what’s going on.  I have the BoM site (that’s the Bureau of Meteorology) and a range of specifc pages bookmarked.  Our electricity company has a fairly regularly updated page about power outages, and you only need to enter your postcode to find out what’s wrong with the power.  Surely there was similar information regarding Toronto.

Alas and alack, there doesn’t seem to be.  My Google-Fu was letting me down.  I spent an hour search fruitlessly for inforation regarding what was going on.  An hour into the blackout and I was no wiser.

Enter Twitter.  On the off chance that someone on Twitter knew something about what was going on, I searched for Toronto and power and lo, and behold, there was some information.  There was even a hashtag.  Already!  I spent 24 hours with the search page open, and was relaying that information to my daughter via email.  If we’d been more organised and thoughtful, we perhaps would have scheduled email exchanges to keep the batteries of her Blackberry fresh, just in case, but it was a more random exchange.

But I can’t help but wonder about the power of Twitter.  I’ve been hanging around twitter for quite some time, on and off, mostly off, but for the last few months, since the protests against Australia’s Censorwall (aka nocleanfeed, aka the great barrier wall, aka Conroy’s stupid plan), I’ve been a wee bit more involved.  I’m sill not very inclined to post updates, mostly because I’m on holidays and it would be like, ‘yay, got up’, ‘sandwiches for lunch’, ‘more wii-ing’, ‘shopping for purple stuff’.  I’m sure that would get kinda inane.  But still, I”ve been watching and following a few more people and am kinda getting into it, in more than just a vicarious way.

It seems to me, however, that Twitter provides much more immediate information.  The search I performed in the first hour, via Google, provided two hits from 2003.  It now returns over 500 hits[1].  But in that first few hours of any emergency, the information available via Twitter is way more powerful, because it is the people affected giving the information.  It takes a while for the mainstream to catch up, and while Google is not quite mainstream, it feeds the mainstream news.  It relies on a different set of information, that is more structured, more widely accessible.  But The Twitter, well, that’s the power of the people.  That’s the network at work.

The Twitter is an immediacy of information.

The Google is a coalescence of information.

Two powerful sources of information at opposite ends of the scales.  What could be more wonderful than that!

Footnote: My Queenslander daughter, who insisted we put the fire on if the temperature went below 17C, survived 24 hours with no power in Toronto at -17C.

1. News search term: Toronto power outage [↩]

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 18th, 2009 at 8:10 am and is filed under thoughts. 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.