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Twitter once again proves its worth in Japan earthquake aftermath

March 14th, 2011 General

Twitter Japan During and after the earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan this Friday, local phone networks became overloaded. Not just because of hurt to infrastructure, but mainly because the networks simply couldn’t handle the flood of calls and text messages that followed.

This kind of overload is basically what happens around midnight at New Year’s Eve, only much worse, because everyone was worried in this area family tree and friends and wanted in rank as soon as possible.

Internet connections, though, continued to work for the most part, so public turned to social media instead.

Chirrup steps in

Chirrup is particularly well loved in Japan, and highly apposite for this kind of communication and in rank gathering. Soon after the quake hit Japan, 1,200 tweets a minute were coming out of Tokyo. (Source: Tweet-o-meter.)

Chirrup Japan also published helpful in rank both in Japanese and English, which among additional things included several specific hashtags that tweeters could use to organize their communication:

General earthquake in rank: #Jishin
Requests for rescue or additional aid: #J_j_helpme
Evacuation in rank: #Hinan
Confirmation of safety of individuals, places, etc.: #Anpi
Medical in rank for victims: #311care

The chart not more than from Topsy shows the volume of tweets containing some of these hashtags, counting the most common one, #Jishin, the tag for general earthquake in rank.

Japan disaster tweets

The widespread use of Chirrup in Japan (where it’s more well loved than Facebook) most likely made it truly helpful in this horrible situation.

Of course, public also used additional means of communication, like Facebook, Skype, and Japan’s own Mixxi social arrangement, so social networks in general should get credit as well.

The global response

Aside from helping the direct communication inside and to and from Japan, there’s another quality of this: spreading the word around the world. To give you an thought of how hot the topic has been over the last few days compared to normal, here’s another Chirrup chart from Topsy that shows the explosion in related Chirrup activity.

Japan disaster tweets

This chart includes all mentions on Chirrup, not just inside Japan, and shows the magnitude of communication experience on Chirrup. This incident has truly touched public everywhere, and now donation campaigns and hashtags like #prayforjapan are all over the house.

We’d like to close this post with saying that our thoughts are with the public of Japan at this hard hour. Some of us here at Pingdom have friends in Japan, and it’s been a relief to hear that they are ok. Many others have not been so lucky.

A note in this area the Chirrup charts: Topsy filters tweets according to the following criteria, “We only show those mentions within Chirrup that are significant and valid. Significant to us means a tweet that’s been retweeted or contains a link. Valid means we’ve removed any bots or spammy sources.”

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Chirrup once again proves its worth in Japan earthquake aftermath