Another cool and actually useful application for Twitter’s location feature: Detecting, tracking, and reporting earthquakes.
The USGS is reportedly developing a system that scans Twitter for conversation about earthquakes, mapping them using Twitter’s new geolocation data.
Timothy B. Hurst, EcoPolitology: The energy behind that kind of behavior is what is behind the Twitter Earthquake Detection (USGSted) project [USGS seismologist Dr. Paul] Earle is heading up. TED uses the Twitter social networking platform to collect real-time, earthquake-related messages from anywhere around the globe. “For earthquakes in sparsely instrumented regions, these detections could provide an initial heads up that an earthquake may have occurred,” explains Earle.
TED uses an application programming interface that aggregates tweets based on keywords like “earthquake” and “tremor” to pull tweets about a particular earthquake into a database. Then the USGS generates an e-mail report containing the magnitude, location, depth below the surface, number of tweets about the earthquake broken down by their location, and text of the first 40 or 50 tweets.
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