Fun with the USGS

Today was a work at home day. I can scarcely believe that some days I am lucky enough to get to work in my fatass yoga pants in my comfy Ikea Poang chair after rolling out of bed 15 minutes before the time I am due to start.

But I am, and so I was sitting in my Poang when it began to rock BOING BOING BOING. I looked around. Dog was on the couch. Ahhhhh......

EARTHQUAKE!

And just that fast, I hopped on my Mac and typed "EARTHQUAKE" into Twitter. Because I know what to do in case of emergency: social networking.

I probably wouldn't have thought of it, but in talking to Karoli on the way up to BlogHer, she mentioned that she gets a feed of tweets that mention earthquakes.

The tweets popped up fast and furious while I opened a new tab and typed in www.usgs.gov - I wanted to be the first to get the stats from the US Geological Survey. I first just had the map info, which looked like a 7.0 quake in San Diego county. I twittered that, then corrected a few seconds later: 5.8 epicentered near Chino Hills.

In 5 minutes, the twittosphere had spoken and everyone was ok. My cell phone didn't work. It took 10 minutes for our local news to break into programming and report. But Twitter did the job before anyone else could.