The survival of 155 passengers and crew from a jetliner landing in the Hudson River was nothing short of amazing. Reports of the water landing were posted to the "micro blogging" Web site twitter.com within moments of the crash.
US Airways Flight 1549 ended up in the Hudson River just off the shore of New York City, the largest population center in the nation. Thousands of people witnessed the crash of the Airbus A320, many of them armed with state-of-the-art cell phones equipped with cameras and high-speed connections to the Internet.
Hundreds began posting their eyewitness accounts to Twitter, a Web site designed for users to post one or two sentence updates on their daily lives. As in the case of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, Twitter became a source for breaking news with instant reports from the scene.
Television proved to be the most powerful medium for relating the scope of the accident with live video beamed from helicopters to screens around the globe. Seeing the plane floating in the frigid waters of the Hudson underscored the heroic efforts of the pilots and flight attendants to save all souls aboard the crippled and sinking airliner.
But while TV anchors speculated about the cause and the exact number of passengers, and reporters scrambled for the facts, Twitter users were reporting eyewitness accounts in real time. Those reports lacked any vetting or other verification, but any doubts about credibility were quickly overwhelmed with the detail of those dispatches.
