Yesterday evening (CET) I got the message about the crash of an airplane in New York City by twitter. First of all: I am happy to see that all 155 passengers are alive and in good shape! As one survivor on CNN as answer of the question, what he would like to say to the captain, said: "Thank you, thank you, thank you.".
Normally I would not really recognize an incident like that, but only two weeks ago I was flying over the Hudson in a helikopter and cruising around in one of the typical sight seeing boats, which I saw at the scene of that accident on CNN. So, I am very happy that all did survive :).
But what was not less impressing yesterday, was the unbelievable speed and the power of the - caution buzzword - web 2.0. Just before spiegel.de got a detailed message to the incident I knew about it through twitter. Only 34 (!) minutes after the crash a passenger of one of the described boats uploaded a photo of the scene by his iPhone and twitter account. I don't think that any press agency delivered such a picture earlier.
And by watching CNN over the next 2 hours I got an impression how far away the folks in the US are from our media here in Germany, or the other way around how far behind we are here. CNN filled his program with "user generated content" from its own web platform iReport.com and could so deliver very close reports.
By the way: see what's going on in the world now by watching Twitscoop.
