Bangalore Blasts: Twitterers responded faster than main stream media

Bomb blasts rock Bangalore - is the old news now. When I heard it first time, instead of going to any news site I went to twitter. My colleagues were searching for this on news channels, but they were unable to get latest updates. Sooner they all surrounded me to see latest updates on twitter. Even I started updating to twitter on whatever I know.

Within few minutes of blast news, Laxman (@Scorpion032) created a twitter bot which automatically gets tweets with Bangalore & re-tweets it. But the idea didn’t continued to work because of too many updates containing Bangalore. Arun Ram (@arunram) started a twitter ID for those who wants to update they are safe & unable to use their mobile phones. In another few minutes bangalore has become top keyword on summize (now search.twitter.com).

Tons os tweets about Bangalore started pouring in & http://search.twitter.com/search?q=bangalore responded well to show real time updates about Bangalore Blast. @Mukund started updating details about Bangalore Blasts which were really interesting. Twitter has become great medium of communication in these critical conditions.

Try http://search.twitter.com for latest updates on anything you want. If you still not on Twitter, sign up at www.twitter.com. If you like you can follow my updates on twitter at http://twitter.com/hnprashanth

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Twitter is a service which ask you “what are you doing?”. But it’s deviated a lot from this theme & evolved as a big microblogging platform. You can just update whatever you want through web, IM or Phone. Others can follow your updates & can receive updates via all three mentioned mediums.

Twitter has millions of users & finding people from your location to interact is difficult as there is no such option provided right now. Abhinav Sarkar, a forth year student in IIT Kharagpur, created a script just for fun. But the script is really useful, it is written in python & uses Twitter API. Primarily script crawls Abhinav’s Indian friends on twitter by looking at location entry as “India”, “Bangalore”, “Mumbai”…etc into his database. Later script crawls his friend’s Indian friends & so on, the list keeps building. Finally, the result is a directory of all Indian Twitterers!

This list can be accessed at
http://abhinav.sarkar.googlepages.com/indiantwitterers.html

Great work Abhinav

Update:

Abhinav has created a twitter bot which follows, collects tweets from all Indian Twitterers & re-tweets them. So, you can follow this bot to follow all Indian twitterers tweets. Follow this bot at http://twitter.com/IndiaTwit