IDG Contributor Network: Twitter mining can help protect facilities

News of the death of Whitney Houston, the Boston Marathon bombings and the raid on Osama Bin Laden were all tweeted before traditional media picked-up on the stories.

With over 350,000 tweets sent per minute, by people all over the world, all going about their everyday lives, breaking news can show up on Twitter immediately—far quicker than it can take a journalist or public safety agency to show on scene.

News agencies, for example, are “unlikely to have journalists pre-positioned,” Tom Glocer, former CEO of Reuters said in a recent blog post about how social networks are breaking news faster than traditional ones.

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