The US Geological Survey (USGS) has begun to tap into the popular micro-blogging site Twitter. According to them this is one of the fastest ways to find out where tremors have hit because as soon as they do people start sharing the news with their friends.

What the USGS has done is to launch an official Twitter Earthquake Detection (TED) Program.
What the system does is gather Tweets from across Twitter that mention the word earthquake either in English or other foreign languages. Compile all of these Tweets together and Map them. It is then easy to start following people Tweeting about earthquakes according to their Geo-location. The Tweets which are not location based will be skipped as the system wants to pinpoint where the earthquake is taking place in real-time