NHO: I'm curious, for you personally ⦠you said you came into this as a skeptic about Twitter, and I'm curious about how your thinking about this technology has evolved as a result of getting involved in this?
Earle: One, I'd say that I think the average user of Twitter is over thirty. It's not a bunch of teenagers. There's a lot of fairly mature conversations going on. All the information in these conversations is not contained in 140 characters. Usually it will be 140 characters with a link to a more exhaustive article. So people will tweet about an interesting article that they read. So it's more mature than I naively thought.
The idea of publicly broadcast messages I find intriguing. I think its full potential hasn't been figured out yet. We certainly haven't figured out its full potential for earthquakes. How it will evolve will be interesting. I don't know if Twitter will be around forever, but I think the concept of publicly searchable succinct messages will be. I think it's a useful way of communicating. Not that my opinion on this mattersâ"I'm a seismologist.
Another important point is, it's very cheap to do this. They supply all the application program interfaceâ"it's a way the computer can search and download the tweetsâ"they have all these APIs written. Our whole system was built by one student who was full-time in the summer and part-time during the school year. And that's less money than it costs to install a single seismometer, of which we have thousands around the world. So for less than the price of single seismometer we can build this system that augments the information we have, for very
little input. It's a potential way to reach more people and educate them about earthquakes.
- Effective
- Efficient
- A way to involve the public
- Not the only answer, but an answer to using technology
