Twitter, LA earthquake and my family...

A few days ago I commented here on a blog post related to the fact that people on a plane in Bangalore were using Twitter to communicate about what was happening to their plane. I was a taken aback by the near real time reporting of something like that.

Well, I'm working today and I see someone mention an earthquake in LA on Twitter. My wife and daughter and other family members are in LA today. They were in fact at Disneyland at the time of the quake. My wife and sister-in-law were in line at Space Mountain when the quake hit. My daughter was with her grandmother in line to see Goofy. She, thankfully doesn't know what happened being only 3 yrs old, she moved on to the next ride she wanted to go on pretty quickly as I understand it...the evacuation shut that down of course.

I was attempting to get in touch with my wife while watching the various "tweets" on Twitter about the quake.

I've officially lived through a world event on Twitter today where my family was directly involved...quite an experience. Social media has all sorts of benefits to it and there are drawbacks too but in this case I was happy to be able to ascertain the severity of what happened in near real time and without a CNN producer deciding what was being told. Further, I was able to combine both CNN coverage with Twitter to get a more complete picture.

The great news is basically everyone in LA is ok, including in this case, MY FAMILY and that's the main thing. A pretty nerve racking hour to say the least...