Twitter & The Web Play Crucial Role In Mumbai Terror Attacks Aftermath

As Mumbai is reeling under the worst terrorist strike it has ever seen, people are thronging over the web to get latest updates and eyewitnesses of the unfolding drama, instead of turning on their TV sets.

Some of the prominent social networking platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, are providing on-the-scene updates, after a few moments when the first shot was fired.

Twitter appears to have an edge with around 50 to 100 messages - popularly known as “tweets” - labelled under the chain of “#mumbai” or “Mumbai”, uploaded every sixty seconds. 

When the news of the attack first broke out, tweets were being posted on the website at an astonishing rate of around 14 messages per second, according to sources.

Tweets have also been posted urging users to rush to JJ Hospital in Mumbai for donating blood, as stocks are likely to fall short in the wake of this carnage.

The firsthand information of the tragedy came from Vinukumar Ranganathan, a Mumbai-based journalist, who captured around 300 photographs of the atrocity, and uploaded them on to his Flickr account, and the photos have been viewed around 50,000 times on the website.

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In addition, a new page, dubbed as “November 2008 Mumbai Attacks”, has been added on Wikipedia, within few minutes of the news hit the blogosphere, and a team of editors are continuously adding real-time details in it.

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