I was woken up this morning by Vara, yelling into my ear. “There is a Tsunami warning for Fiji, wake up. Do you think it’s gonna come this far”?

We’re about a mile from the beach, but also at an elevation of about 50m or so. I replied, “No, not gonna come this far”. I was up all night on a project so this was not at the slightest bit interesting to me right now.

In my half alseep state however, each passing car started to sound like an approaching wave, crashing through the coconut trees and quickly tearing it’s way up the hill towards us. I decided to was time to wake up.

I started making my tea, listening to the radio. It was going on about the Tsunami warning and evacuations etc. There was a report about that the sea was retreating in the Yasawa’s. OK, sounds like this is a real disaster.

The first thing that came to mind was to see if I could get more up to date information online. I typed in http://twitter.com/ and did a search for “tsunami fiji“.

There were 2-3 updates every minute, and most of them stating the Tsunami warnings were already withdrawn. However, the radio was still going on with the warning. I didn’t really want to trust twitter solely, since most of it was just word of mouth.

I tried google, which would not have been useful in this situation a week ago. However, early this month they had implemented “search options” which allowed you to filter search results by date, showing the most recent results first.

Google proved to be up to date, with trusted information. Twitter had been just as, or maybe a few minutes ahead, but it took weeding through a few posts to finally get a trusted source.

It didn’t take long for Fiji Times to post an update on the cancelled Tsunami warning for Fiji. Which was immediately picked up by google, as well as twitter.

A few months ago I had the need to search for some very up to date information. Twitter provided the best source, in which google was quite useless. Now google seems to have noticed that they needed to provide realtime results. Twitter however still has the edge, with human interaction in near real-time and a wider range of resources. For example, if the Tsunami had actually hit, you could have watched it from around the world via Fiji Webcam link posted on twitter.

Now looking at this, I’m amazed at how close up to date information, especially those of large human interest such as disasters, is on the web now, mostly attributed to Twitter. Forget the radio, I’m doing a twitter search.