How Social Media was better than any other source in Japan's Quake

Japan’s Internet is largely intact after the 8.9-magnitude earthquake that struck Friday, allowing online services to play a pivotal role in connecting victims of the quake with families and friends unsure of their whereabouts.

While the earthquake knocked out electricity supplies and shut down two nuclear power plants, Internet availability remains relatively unaffected, according to a blog post from Internet monitoring company Renesys.

In a message sent Friday from the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo to U.S. citizens in Japan, the Embassy encouraged Americans “to continue your efforts to be in contact with your loved one(s) using SMS texting and other social media (e.g., FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.) that your loved one(s) may use.”

Additionally, the message suggested Americans in Japan use other online services including the Google Person Finder and the Red Cross’s Family Links website in order to make their whereabouts and conditions known.

Google often creates Person Finder sites during emergencies that allow people to leave information about their whereabouts or information about a missing person. At the time of writing, there were about 158,700 records for Japan — more than 140,000 more records than were submitted to the last such site it set up for the victims of the Christchurch earthquake in February.

The Red Cross site operates in a similar manner, publishing a list of names with contact information of people who want to make it known that they are alive and people whose relatives have indicated they are missing.

But perhaps the most simple method people in Japan have turned to for connecting with loved ones throughout the emergency is posting to their social media accounts. Less than an hour after the quake, the number of tweets from Tokyo topped 1,200 per minute, according to Tweet-o-Meter. An interactive graphic created by Facebook to illustrate status updates related to the quake shows Japan’s activity on Facebook during that day was also high.

Some shared stories of connecting with loved ones using the platform are on the Facebook stories page.

“We have spent the morning doing a roll call with all of our family and friends in Japan, Papua New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand and all over the South Pacific Ocean,” reads one submission to the page. “Much faster and easier than the Red Cross or even trying to get through on the phone lines!”