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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Technology
Paul Lester

Once again, Twitter proves its worth

Passengers stand on the wings of a US Airways plane
Passengers stand on the wings of a US Airways plane after it made an emergency landing in the Hudson river. Photograph: Gary Hershorn/Reuters

OK, Twitter. We get it. Once again, you have proved yourself a worthy adversary of traditional media. As television news channels scrambled for information about the US Airways plane that crashed into the Hudson River, users were sending out photos, emergency phone numbers and details of the accident.

Janis Krums of Sarasota, Florida was on a ferry that was assisting in rescue efforts when he sent a photo to Twitter from his iPhone.

His Twitter status read:

"There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy."

This isn't the first instance where the micro-blogging site beat traditional news sources to the punch. Minutes after the Mumbai terrorist attacks, witnesses flooded Twitter with first-hand accounts of the carnage.

UPDATE: The disaster drove so much traffic to TwitPic that the service struggled to cope. TwitPic's Noah Everett said the site was "getting hammered". Maybe TwitPic will need its own Twitter-esque Fail Whale.

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