Its strange that over the past few months I have been reading a lot about the real time web and how important it is to have the latest information at your fingertips.

For those of you who this term is new to you Wikipedia defines the Real Time Web as:

The real-time web is a set of technologies and practices which enable users to receive information as soon as it is published by its authors, rather than requiring that they or their software check a source periodically for updates. It is fundamentally different from real-time computing since there is no knowing when, or if, a response will be received. The information types transmitted this way are often short messages, status updates, news alerts or links to longer documents. The content is often "soft" in that it is based on the social web - people's opinions, attitudes, thoughts and interests - as opposed to hard news or facts.

I can certainly see how being on top of news as it happens is important; but until Saturday Night I had never experienced it first hand.

It was just after midnight when we started to feel the house shaking. I was on the couch at the time and we all jumped up to see what was happening, check on the kids in bed etc. After about a minute and a half the shaking stopped and we came to the conclusion that we had just experienced an earthquake. (Apparently it went for three minutes; however our couches are just way to comfortable to notice)

So there was the instant urge for knowledge. What just happened, how big was it and more importantly was there an incoming tsunami.

So where did the answers come from?

A movie was just finishing on Channel 9 - The perfect spot for an import new bulletin to interrupt our viewing. - Nothing

Google News - Nothing

Beuru of Meteorology Website - Nothing

It was then that I realised that trying to find information out on an event that had only just happened a minute ago was actually going to be very tricky.

So the solution (although I have been trying to avoid it) was Twitter.

A quick search for #earthquake and #darwin showed 4 results all within the last minute; of people Tweeting locally saying that they had just been woken up by an earthquake. - I gotta admit that that takes dedication to wake up in the night; realise that your in an earthquake and immediately tweet about it.

Over the next 2 minutes a further 150 Tweets joined the original message, many from all across the Indonesia area. This was good enough to give us a location of the earthquake; and also links to the earthquake monitoring sites that were all lit up like a Christmas tree as alarms in the sea all activated.

I then became my own little news broadcaster repeating facts that I had found to all my friends on msn at the time.

Its here that I realised how important information can be when you need it at your fingertips. Now luckily there was no immediate danger to us; but this 7.6 Quake had big potential to cause problems and Indonesians were lucky that it was so far underground so not to trigger a tsunami.

The Real News Services did finally come to the aid. About 10 minutes after the quake; Sky News UK broke in reporting about it and confirmed a lot of what we already knew.

So the Real Time web is something that I can see in the future for being very handy for news and news reporting; and until today I never thought that say a delay of 10-15 minutes from the main stream news was that important (TV and Radio); and the daily wait for a newspaper was really that bad of a trade off; until its something that really has affected you.