So rumour has it that Twitter 'beat' even the US Geological Survey in reporting the earthquakes in China.
This was flagged up by tweet-a-second obsessive Robert Scoble, who said he saw a tweet from Twitter's dtan in Beijing before news outlets had picked up on the story - and in fact while the earthquake was still happening.
The Chinese video site QQ has been aggregating videos from the earthquake zones; Twitter might have got the bare bones but it's the video reports that show the real terror and impact of the quake as it happens. Global Voices pick up some of those, and the Online Journalism Blog chronicled how the news broke outside the mainstream media.
Massive breaking news events traditionally push the development and take-up of these kind of tools by news organisations, but then we shouldn't be that surprised about that. There is so much more to explore in Twitter as a real-time news medium, and if you've become a micro-blogging addict it would be logical to use that if you find yourself in the middle of a breaking news event.
Twitter already has an early-adopting audience of somewhere between 1m and 1.5m (they won't say), so the spread of real-time news through these networks will grow exponentially.
On a very different scale, yesterday I was keeping an eye on a trial on the Liverpool Daily Post website, which is using the Cover It Live tool to aggregate a conversation between readers and reporters. It's a fairly bare bones implementation but that's not the point - the readers involved in this are totally stuck in.
Alison Gow, deputy editor of the site, told me they first tried it for the local elections on May 1, with 16 reporters at 9 different counts across the city using Twitter, and then three editors in the office aggregating those comments to Cover It Live, updating a Google Map, using the live video service Qik and answering questions and comments from users.
"For something major, like a big news event, it's the equivalent of the PA snap," said Gow. "It's a clean, fantastic quality tool - by 2am we had had 3,000 unique users."
About 300 comments were posted by users during the night, from 10pm to 3am, and one of the local Conservative candidates (one who didn't have a chance, presumably) used the site to check the results as they came in.
Yesterday, the site ran an open discussion around the paper's news conference; Gow described that as part of an effort to make the processes and decisions behind the newsroom open and transparent.
"The level and depth of knowledge showed [users] were really well informed and there was a nice mix of people," said David Higgerson, who leaves his job as assistant digital editor of the site on June 2 to become head of regional multimedia for Trinity Mirror, the site's parent company.
He said he felt the Cover It Live trial has dispelled the myth about political apathy, but yesterday's newsroom project had been harder to manage because there were so many subjects covered; conversation veered from Sex & The City to Frank Fields.
Higgerson thinks there is more potential for real-time reporting, both in video and text, for various award ceremonies hosted by the paper, for football matches and also for events around the Capital of Culture.
As a taster, a poll on the blog said 55% thought it was an interested experiment and 3% said they "weren't feeling it".
Gow wrote in the blog that the team had been "engaged in dialogues with people since 7am this morning... I think we've succeeded in that we've tested some new technology, talked to people, and learned a lot of valuable lessons about what is possible, what we could do if this was to run over a major breaking news event - and how sometimes our systems aren't delivering what we want them to."
• Update: Keith McSpurren from Cover It Live just mailed to say the Belgian news site Lalibre.be is using the service now to cover today's announcement about tennis player Justine Henin, who is to retire. Elsewhere Guido Fawkes used it to cover Prime Minster's questions today and Iain Dale has also dabbled.
