Better Living through Software

I woke up to the sound of CCTV News blaring the tidings that a magnitude 7.8 earthquake just hit the most populated area of China.  Most westerners have heard of major Chinese cities like Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Guangzhou — and even Nanjing, Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Shenzhen.  But few know about Chongqing; the biggest city in China, with more than 30 million people.

The earthquake was centered on a line between Chengdu and Mianyang in Sichuan province, just outside Chongqing.  This is an area with relatively modest foreign influence, but massive population.  Because of its central position between north and south, as well as access to cheap hydroelectric power, Microsoft is building a massive data center in Chengdu, a joint venture with HP billed as the “largest high-availability data center in Asia”.

Scoble is reporting that several people twittered the earthquake as it happened.  This is no surprise, since roughly 1 out of every 5 people in China would be able to feel an earthquake of that magnitude centered in Chengdu.  We are talking about a population the size of the U.S. population who would feel the earthquake, even if you assume that the north and south were completely unaffected.  There would be hundreds or thousands of English-speaking expats in Shanghai who could feel it.

It’s silly in the extreme to act like twitter is somehow breaking news, though.  Masses of people within China found out about the earthquake as it was happening via messages from friends on QQ (which is massively more popular than twitter), and CCTV carried the news almost instantly.  I suppose it’s cute that some English-speaking expats using echo-chamber technology were able to *also* report the event on twitter, but even the tweetscan example seems a bit lame to me.  When I search for tweets with the word “地震”, tweetscan gives me nothing — apparently tweetscan doesn’t care about Chinese.  Perhaps this explains why Scoble and BBC are reporting only English tweets from China.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 9:52 am and is filed under China, Life at Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.