New York, NY – When Virginia’s magnitude 5.8 earthquake hit last August, the first Twitter reports sent from people at the epicenter began almost instantly at 1:51 p.m.—and reached New York about 40 seconds ahead of the quake’s first shock waves, according to calculations by the social media company SocialFlow. The flood of messages peaked at 5,500 tweets a second.
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All of this data is also proving to be valuable in the marketplace. Hundreds of social media, data-mining and financial-services companies now are paying a base rate of up to $360,000 a year for Twitter’s information, according to executives at the two companies that are licensed to market it world-wide—Gnip Inc. in Boulder, Colo., and Datasift in Reading, U.K.
“Twitter is protective of who has the data and where it is going,” said Nick Halstead, chief operating officer at DataSift. “It is the ultimate customer research tool.”
Read the full story at The Wall Street Journal