Twitter Based "Ted" System Warns of Earthquakes Earlier

hypnosec writes "A Twitter-based system managed to detect the earthquake off the Philippines before any other advanced spotting systems being used by Seismologists. The U.S. Geological Survey uses the micro-blogging site to quickly gather information about earthquakes around the globe through the use of a system — Twitter Earthquake Detection (TED) — which beat out USGS's own sensors on Friday when it came to detecting a 7.6 magnitude earthquake off the Philippine coast. The TED system gathers earthquake related messages (Tweets) in real time from Twitter. The system takes into consideration various parameters like place, time, keywords, and photographs of affected places where tremors have been detected. Online information posted by people — Tweets, in this case — can be picked up faster by researchers, compared to scientific alerts that may take up to 20 minutes."

Re:Looks like another XKCD that works

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

Whoa, chill out rage man. I read it and the "TED" feed. I'm suggesting upgrades. TED only says the locations of where the earthquakes are. I was thinking of more precise engine which gives exact long/lat of it, and even takes into consideration your smart phones long/lat. Sure TED looks nice in that it can tell you ahead of time, for most of the time, it's gonna be tweeting about EarthQuakes who aren't around you, which is like crying wolf and your alarm goes down. I was thinking of a smart phone ap that read from TED for your own specific encounter, as to not give out lots of false alarms etc etc etc. Does this make sense to anyone? It could be called "Earthquake Ap", and only alarms you if an EarthQuake is withing X hundred miles of you.