USGS pays Twitter to tap into its data. A program automatically sorts through the tweets coming from Twitter’s 316 million active users. When, all of a sudden, lots of people in a specific area start sending out messages about earthquakes, government researchers get an alert.  “It’s not a revolutionary change in what we do, but it just gives us that extra minute to start on our response,” said Paul Earle, a seismologist at the federal agency.

Source: CNN

Date: October 13th, 2015

Link: http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/07/technology/twitter-earthquakes/index.html

Discussion

1) The article talks about how useful it is to have essentially 316 million active users as sensors.  What other applications could this sort of technology (really more data analytics than technology) be used for?

2) Anyone can connect to the Twitter “firehose” (where all the tweets come out) for free at https://dev.twitter.com/streaming/overview.    How might you use this personally?