Today I was amazed by how the story about the plane crash at Schiphol evolved on the Internet. One of our colleagues was first to tell us about it, some 10 minutes after it happened. She was called by her boyfriend who works for the local TV here. The first thing I thought when I heard it was to check Twitter.
Yes, one of my Twitter friends @sgfwarnaars had already reported the crash and made reference to @nipp, who seemed to be twittering from the crash scene itself. Actually the first Twitter about the crash by @nipp was really a mere minute after it happened. When I checked his report, he had about 30 followers and was telling his first impressions. Of course I retweeted his report, as did many others.
Then I looked at twitterfall.com, where you can look at all tweets on a certain search term. The flow of tweets was rapidly increasing, reaching around 2 per second at some stage. This is when the news spread as a fire through the Internet.
I switched on the radio to get the latest information. But the tweets that were posted were more informative than the radio. The first photo was posted on twitpic.com, a service used to by twitter users to post photos as twitter itself can only hold text. One link after the other appeared on Twitter to new photos. Some were published on news sites like nu.nl and nos.nl, but only via Twitter was it possible to get a full view of the events unfolding.
Within one hour, @nipp had amassed some 350 followers. Two hours later, the tally was at 807. Being amongst one of the first to report the crash on Twitter, he started to get requests from many news agencies. At around 15:00, he was live on Radio 3FM. Later Al Jazeera called him.
At the same time another witness story started unfolding. @ansgarjohn was apparently on the scene just after the crash and actually rushed to the plane to offer his help. He reported briefly about his heroic efforts about an hour later on Twitter, with a last message saying “going to take a shower to get rid of blood and mud #schiphol”. Later, he got contacted by many news agencies, giving interviews on Radio 1 and on TV in Een Vandaag. Starting with some 5 followers, his tally is now 162.
Whilst there were many false items on Twitter, the errors were also corrected most quickly. When CNN started reporting about the crash of an Airbus 380 (sic), the Twitter community picked it up immediately and made many sarcastic comments about it. The report of zero dead (this came from a Turkish minister) was quickly followed by eye witnesses, including @nipp, saying this was not possible. It seems Twitter cannot be used to spread false news, as there will always be people to correct it.
Overall, it’s incredible how accurate the information is you get from Twitter, just filter out the few false alerts and keep looking at the tweets with the most re-tweets. Of course a lot of the news on Twitter was coming directly from new agencies, especially after about an hour. But the combination of all the news items gives an incredible detailed account of the events.
UPDATE (26/02/2009): More reports on how Twitter is changing the news gathering can be found on The Telegraph, ireport (here you can see how ’schiphol’ became the nr 1 ranked tag on Twitter yesterday) and NOS (in Dutch).