News travels fast

Many of us have often marvelled at how Twitter often scoops the mainstream press and news is announced first on Twitter by ordinary people.  Last week's earthquake in Los Angeles is evidence of that. 

And this morning's propane explosion in Toronto really demonstrates the impact of Twitter as well. Jeremiah Owyang (does this guy ever sleep?) was following the story on Twitter.

 

Photographer Rannie Turingan awoke to the sounds of explosions and went to work, twittering as he posted photos. His blog, Photojunkie, captured the story before any of the mainstream media. However, not only were the Photojunkie pictures picked up my major newspapers and magazines, but LA Times Travel blogger, Jen Leo, wrote about the story this morning based on her reading @jowyang's twitter stream. 

For a steady stream of Twitter explosion updates, Search.twitter.com (Summize) has a great feed. 

Quick Tweets

As many of my readers know, I try to track all of the Twitter stories each day and I catalog them with a delicious tag which you can find in the sidebar on this site.  Today, I thought I'd display some of the more prominent ones that I found. Here are the top Twitter stories of the day all in 140 characters or less:

From Louis Gray, Twitter reduced the API requests for unauthenticated requests from unlimited to the same 100 rate as authenticated API hits.

From Corvida, on SheGeeks, Twitter has a new redesign coming.

Nikki Pilkington in the UK writes about new Twitter happenings including the Olympics on Twitter, twitterific for the iPhone, and many ways to search.

In a guest post on Mashable, Andy Beal provides 5 tips for building a stellar brand.

Community Guy Jake McKee posts a Twitter cartoon.

Duncan Riley with Australia's the Inquisitr reviews a new Twitter competitor, Youare.com, calling it Twitter2.0.

Please let me know what you think of these stories and this new feature.