[sobinator]

Earthquakes, and the twitter responses to them, have been the focus of some pretty interesting academic studies that I've read (2011 Christchurch, NZ was what I studied). If I still had access to the academic journals, I'd pull up some articles. They present fantastic case studies of how using twitter user lat/longs, time logs, and nlp can be very useful.

[ngoldbaum]

When I lived in California I would often do a twitter search after feeling a small earthquake. If there weren't any results, I would usually assume it was a truck passing by or something like that.

Very often there would be tweets about the earthquake several minutes before the official USGS page for the earthquake was created.