Kerry had written on Emily’s Facebook wall very early that morning. I woke up early too, I just felt wide awake. The first site I opened was Facebook, and there it was: ‘Emily, is everyone okay?’ The message had a bit more to it than just ‘Are you OK?’, which I think is a pretty average Facebook comment that you’d see most days.
For me ‘Is everyone okay?’, has alarm bells written all over it. And so it proved. Little did I know how much time I’d be spending on Facebook and Twitter during the rest of the day following the events that unfolded in the mighty Pacific (mostly on Twitter, but I’ll come on to that).
Emily is a mutual Facebook friend living in Japan. What had happened, I wondered? I presumed there’d been some sort of natural disaster or maybe a terrorist attack. Next stop BBC News online. You know it’s bad when the homepage dramatically increases the size of the top story; even more so when it pushes a story like ‘Libya’ down to into second. This was big.
“A 8.9-magnitude tremor has struck off the coast of Honshu island at a depth of about 24km, 400km (250 miles) north-east of Tokyo.
It was nearly 8,000 times stronger than last month’s quake in New Zealand that devastated the city of Christchurch.” (BBC News Friday 11th March 2011)
Then it was to Twitter. I knew from previous events (eg Haiti earthquake, Egypt/Libya etc uprisings, Iranian election protests etc.) how Twitter comes into its own when its 140 character tweets are so virally proficient and increasingly accessible (see Google and Twitter launch Tweet Speak). Actually, I use a Twitter interface called TweetDeck, which allows me to have a great deal of control over what Tweets I can follow. First I wanted to find out which hashtags were best to follow to aggregate – what was soon to be – millions of Tweets on the Tsunami. What The Hashtag revealed that #prayforjapan was top, with #japan and #tsunami also trending strongly.
As events developed, so the collective concern grew and was evident on both Facebook and Twitter. What on earth can I/we/anyone do to help? I sat in front of my TweetDeck feed with resigned curiosity. But soon a stream of tweets, from my less aggressively updating All Friends column, started to reinforce the truly stunning communication tool that Twitter has become. Early on I saw, and retweeted (like many others), news that Google has launched a brand new People Finder, to help Japanese citizens locate friends and loved ones. Then there was a BBC map showing estimated times when the tsunami would hit the shores of other Pacific countries – I used this to alert friends. All this alongside the most diverse range of blog, video and picture links I could wish for as a journalist.
“Social communications, like Twitter, and social networking sites, like Facebook, are at their best when big news is breaking,” said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst at Technology Business Research.
“They are the means available to almost everybody to broadcast information, to communicate one-to-many,” he said.” And, in some cases, they help get around bottlenecks in one-to-one communication.” (Computer World, Friday 11th March 2011)
As for Facebook, well… compared to Twitter, it seemed a timid, quiet noticeboard, awestruck by the power and efficiency of its social networking stable mate. But, 24 hours on, it’s playing to its strengths again as people post blogs, articles and prayers with nicely displayed featured images. For me it’s a much nicer interface to access. Compare it to someone whispering to you that your favourite sports team has won the World Championships (Twitter), but then being able to read all about it in technicolor, with nicely displayed pictures and updating comments all under one roof (Facebook). Still, I do wonder about the future of Facebook, as strong as it is now. I think it needs to evolve and to learn from recent Twitter experiences like this one.
So, it seems fitting to end this blog with a Tweet – on a day when social media met a tsunami:
@worldviewmedia Some say ‘I don’t do Facebook or Twitter. I have a life’. Others say ‘I have a life, because of FB and Twitter.’ http://bit.ly/eej4ey #japan
Posted by Andrew Horton
Photo credit: BBC News
March 14, 2011 08:05:19
UPDATE:
We’ve heard from Emily (via Facebook). She’s fine. Everyone’s ‘okay’. But she says she couldn’t have survived without Facebook and Twitter as THE only communication tool when phone lines went down.
According to Harry Wallop in the Daily Telegraph on Sunday:
‘ [...] mobile phone carriers were limiting voice calls on congested networks, with NTT DoCoMo restricting up to 80 per cent of voice calls, especially in Tokyo. Softbank and Au, rival phone companies, were also affected, with Tokyo residents unable to send text messages to friends and relatives. Skype, however, continued to work well, as did Facebook and Twitter as well as Mixi, Japan’s most popular social networking site.’
According to What The Hashtag, #prayforjapan is now currently the second biggest trending hashtag on Twitter, three days after the earthquake that caused the tsunami.
As well as setting up an immediate Person Finder resource, Google has put all its help under one roof with an Online Crisis Center. It has sections for alarms and warnings, disaster message boards, a donations box for the Japanese Red Cross, a map of the earthquake, the latest related news, and live information on the planned blackouts.
Twitter was indeed as busy as I suggested. According to Tweet-o-Meter, three hours after the earthquake there were 1,200 Tweets per minute coming out of Japan. The micro blogging site was also vital too, with users across the world (myself included) sharing estimated times when the tsunami would hit the rest of the Pacific shores (with Hawaii the most imminent concern).
There’s not much that Twitter of Facebook can do to stop the latest threats to the country’s nuclear plants (facing meltdown), but they are no doubt being used to alert people to the dangers – and keep them updated. Some people still have a life, because of Twitter and Facebook.
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