China earthquake: twitter prefered reporting tool

Wen Jiabao, now on his way
via WikipediaEarlier today I got a worried message from a friend in Shanghai who reported that at Nanjing street an office building had been evacuated because of a tremor. He had not yet heard about the 7.6 scale of Richter earthquake 60 miles north of Chengdu, Sichuan's provincial capital, that has been felt all over the country and where Shanghai was relatively unscratched, compared to cities like Chengdu and Chongqing.
He updated me fast on the social networks he was using, and it appeared he relied mostly on Facebook, after having dumped twitter. For me, Twitter had developed in a few hours time into an excellent information tool, combining different sources of information and I knew more about the earthquake than many people in China.
On the ground, in Chengdu, at least three twitterati were on their way - as one called it - to their 15 minutes of world fame.

casperodj slightly dizzy after being shaken around by the Chengdu earthquake for several hours now.
inwalkedbud @casperodj at home in fact, cooking dinner and getting on with things. Just had another aftershock though.

Others kept an eye on what the traditional media were doing, and sometimes worked as a bridge between the Chengdu-based Twitterati and those media.

fuzheado CNN's John Vause in Beijing: 900 school children in Sichuan buried; 3000 troops and helicopters, Wen Jiabao on their way.
michaeldarragh BBC says 100 confirmed dead and rising

A third group kept a close and critical eye on the Chinese internet, where obvious false rumors where combined with interting factlets:

kaiserkuo Take this how you will, but QQ news is posting the 10pm-12am warning for Beijing I thought was erroneous: http://snurl.com/28fym

The twitter story is obvious going to be one of the more important sidepaths, next to the news about the earthquake itself. Report about the first casualties are only coming slowly.

Update: Marc van der Chijs comes with a much more comprehensive report on also different kinds of sources on the earthquake in China. He includes an few really funny anecdotes I decided to skip, because I was in a hurry. But since we are writing history anyway, here are a few of them, great examples of Chinese crisis management that should be preserved for history:

Some interesting tweets followed. Niubi reported that the Beijing air traffic controllers left the control tower when it started shaking (imagine you are a pilot making an approach to Beijing airport and suddenly you cannot reach the tower anymore!). Later he tweeted the CCTV advise of what to do during an earthquake: sit in the corner with a sofa pillow over your head (no kidding!). According to Shizao the first website that went down in China during the earthquake was.... the Earthquake Bureau's website (thanks to Kaiser Kuo for the retweet).