Rare but only 5.8 quake generates as much Twitter traffic as Japan's devastating 9.0

From the official Twitter account, on, you guessed it, Twitter: "Within a minute of today's earthquake, there were more than 40,000 earthquake-related Tweets. And, we hit about 5,500 Tweets per second (TPS). For context, this TPS is more than Osama Bin Laden's death and on par with the Japanese quake."

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

highway61

In fairness, didn’t the Japan quake happen pretty late at night in the US?
- Guest
  
  Yeah it was around 9 or 10 PM eastern if I recall.
Blaine

It’s also worth mentioning the following important facts:

1) Exactly… how well were cellphones and computers working after a 9.0 earthquake?
2) After a 9.0 earthquake, where does ‘tweeting’ fall in your priorities?
- http://twitter.com/LargeHoops LargeHoops
  
  1.You’re Right they probably weren’t.
  2. Pretty high on my list. After Cell phones and pretty much all communication has been cut off the one thing you can rely on is Social media to get the news out to other people that you are alright. So ti would have been in a pretty hard search for someone of communicating that.
- taj
  
  My iPhone wasn’t working as a phone (softbank was overwhelmed), but I was able to post to Facebook that I was OK as I evacuated the building in the moments immediately after the big quake, in Tokyo. That was pretty standard. We could text. We could post. We just couldn’t call through the cell network. Not so many Facebook users in Japan but hordes of Twits.
Brainspore

I’d also be curious to know how many Twitter users there are in Japan compared to the Eastern U.S. It seems like a person who just felt an earthquake might be more likely to tweet about it than someone who just heard about one on the news.

Either way, I really hope “twitter buzz” doesn’t become the new metric for judging relative importance of news stories.
pecoto

Don’t overlook the possibility that it has to do with the frequency that people experience earthquakes. There hasn’t been a serious quake on the East Coast in a LONG time, so folks there will feel a minor trembler and freak out a bit. Here in California, we pretty much sleep through anything lower than a 6 or 7, and Japan is even more earthquake prone than we are. If you are psychologically prepared for the eventuality of an earthquake I think you are less likely to twitter or facebook a “OMFG END OF WORLD QUAKE ALSDKLFODIOD”. Being used to the scenario, you just check on your loved ones, deal with the immediate problems and get on with your life.
- TooGoodToCheck
  
  totally agree. I imagine a little quake in a quake prone area doesn’t get a lot of attention. I’m in baltimore, and it was not much “OMG we’re going to die” and a whole lot of “wtf was that? wait, do we get quakes here? really?”
- BarBarSeven
  
  Few people in NYC—me included—have ever experienced an earthquake of any level first hand like this. I know there were a few tremors about 10 years back, but they were so slight they felt like heavy trucks passing on the street. This was different and while I didn’t panic, I did have a primal sense of “What the fuck…” I could only truly shake after having a decent meal and a nap. Looks like my earthquake virginity is officially gone now!
Talia

Well, there’s a lot of data we don’t have, such as Brainspore’s observation about the Japan twitter users vs US twitter users. Twitter’s gotten a lot of attention in US media, perhaps not so much in Japan? I don’t know.

The severity of the crisis absolutely impacted the figures too, as pointed out. When you’re house is being washed away, you don’t think “better tweet,” you think “RUNRUNRUN” heh. The biggest tragedy for most affected Americans was broken dishes.

Also willing to bet more Americans/Canadians were exposed to the effects than Japanese who wound up in a position to Tweet about it. This thing affected most of the Northeast, up to parts of Canada. That’s a hell of a lot of people who just felt the tremor and reacted to it. The vast majority of whom didn’t need to even so much as move. For me, I was sitting at my desk in front of a computer when it happened. My coworkers and myself all froze and stared at each other in disbelief. Then everyone pretty much took to Facebook ASAP to go, essentially, “holy crap, wtf.” No fleeing necessary. Experienced then shared in the space of a minute.

Also the amount of time required for the news to spread. For all of us who were directly affected (I’m still trying to wrap my mind around having experienced a (very mild) earthquake; as a lifelong east-coaster, that’s bizarre), we obviously knew instantly. Hearing about the Japanese disaster took.. a hard to define amount of time. But longer than instantly. :P

So really.. I think that statistic is not unreasonable.
theeemu

This rings true in my case. I didn’t tweet or post anything about the Japan quake, but I did spend hours following news coverage about it, and later donated clothing and toiletries in two batches to the relief effort.

Today all I did was post “my desk wobbled” and call up my folks to chat, but in the twitter-verse it would seem as though I was somehow more engaged.
Guest

Does tweeting even work in non-Roman characters? If so, were japanese-language tweets included in the total, or are we just counting people who use the english tag #earthquake?
Jack Majewski

The Richter scale is logarithmic. TPS is not.
juepucta

This is the same country that constantly has Orange Snookie trending or one of the three dozen Kardashian and their now sentient butts. Come on.

Are you really surprised.

In case of a friggin’ zombie apocalypse these people would be bitching about how the pounding on their door doesn’t let them hear the singing on Glee.

-G.
kromelizard

The only thing you should ever donate to a disaster relief effort is money, or blood if you’re close enough. Everything else is unneeded crap not worth the cost of shipping and almost uniformly ends up mouldering in storage somewhere.
gijoel

As usual XKCD explains all

http://xkcd.com/723/
sigismund

Not dead which eternal lie… blah blah blah.
OurManInJapan

I live in Tokyo and was in Japan for the quake. A few thoughts:

- The Japanese are avid users of twitter, but they won’t be using #earthquake or any similar. Many of the tweets were tagged with 地震 (earthquake) or simply things like ゆれた ([it] shook).

- Cell service for all major carriers was overloaded and/or down in Tokyo before the quake finished. Almost all tweets were made by people with hard connections.

- If you could look at TPS per second by country (can you?), I guarantee there was a HUGE spike just after the quake, though as I said, this would be primarily from Tokyo users on landlines. Those further north would be more concerned with checking for tsunami alerts and getting to a safe place ASAP.

- After the initial flood of posts, there would be secondary waves as news of the magnitude of the quake was retweeted by those in Osaka and such, who continued to have cell service.
http://twitter.com/_Morrigan Morrigan

I was on Twitter immediately ’cause you can gage the extent of an experience within a very short time (depending on the range of who you follow and where they live). In less than two or three minutes I knew the general range affected, that things shook yet mostly did not break, the USGS website address, and that ALL of my relatives and friends were ok. Considering that land lines and cell phones weren’t working right after the quake, Twitter was invaluable for many.
Baldhead

perhaps the difference is that of single posts vs conversations? I japan, it was “I’m ok” in this one, it was likely more like “i nearly spilled my coffee” “I know, right, what was that?” “earthquake, apparently”……
ChurchTucker

I think SMS messages might be a better metric. The house shakes for a few seconds and I’m on Twitter trying to figure out what the heck that was and who else felt it. The house comes down and I’m texting friends and family.
Sam Ley

I have the same thoughts on it as several other commenters – the number of tweets is due to the LACK of severity. I had several long FB conversations back and forth about “what was that” and “oh here is the link to the USGS page” and “Check out the KMZ file of earthquakes in the last hour” and so on. If it was a serious earthquake, there would not have been any of that idle chitchat amongst the affected people – probably a number of texts “u alive?” would still go out, but otherwise people would be concerned for their own lives, not tweeting.
Joyce Grant

Agreed – in Toronto, I’ve only ever felt two earthquakes in my lifetime. First was last year, and then this one. Both times, we went to Twitter to find out “what the heck was that?” because the news channels hadn’t caught it yet.