Tomorrow one of the largest earthquake drills in California history will take place. An estimated 6.6 million people statewide will participate, with roughly 675,000 of them hailing from Orange County. While the bulk of the participants will simply be doing a typical drop, cover, hold drill, the Orange County Register reported that many O.C. organizations will be doing more. But if that weren’t enough OCReggie, the Orange County Register’s twitter account, asked its followers what they thought about posting simulated tweets during the drill.

Two things came to mind the second I heard the idea. First what a brilliant new use of Twitter, second “oh my god it’ll be the War of the Worlds radio broadcast all over again”. Now I get that most people following the Orange County Register probably live in Orange County, and probably would most likely know whether or not they had a magnitude 7.8 earthquake. However, if they work out of town, or they follow the Register, but don’t live in Orange County they may not be as keen to what is actually going on.

At the time of this writing I had not gotten word back from OCReggie in regards to their plans for the event tomorrow, but will update you as soon as I know. What are your thoughts on a simulated disaster on Twitter? Is it a social media disaster waiting to happen, or is it an innovative new way to prepare us for a disaster? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this since it’s something I have never seen done before or even considered.

UPDATE: Orange County Register staff member Jit Fong Chin got back to me this morning and advised that they would have several reporters covering todays events, but nothing about the actual simulation tweets.  The drill started 21 minutes ago and no simulation tweets have gone out from OCReggie, instead retweets from various OC residents participating in the drill have gone out.

I want to give props to the Orange County Register again for being a newspaper that seems to actually get how to use Twitter effectively.  They are quick to respond and engage their followers and even retweet on ocassion.  Hats off to the OCReggie twitter staff, let’s hope more newspapers can learn from your example.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or GTalk probably know by now that Friday afternoon I lost all of my Twitter followers and everyone I was following. For those of you who didn’t know, let me fill you in:

Mid afternoon on Friday I noticed that I had gone tweetless for quite some time. Upon further investigation I discovered that my follower and following number were both set at 0; a scary realization for someone who had nearly 650 followers and was following over 800 tweeple. After navigating through the terrible, terrible, support system used by Twitter I finally figured out how to report my concern via commenting on the “known issue”. After my post and a number of other user posts Twitter admitted there was a problem and at 3:00 pm PST and advised users that they had a fix and it would be resolved today.

It is now 8:32pm PST and my account, and from what I can tell in the Twitter support thread, a number of other accounts are still without any followers and are unable to follow anyone. That’s over 72 hours without a resolve, which has left me crippled in terms of spreading blog posts, information, and interacting with fellow twitter users.

Earlier this morning I had a brief discussion with some of my fellow SEO Dojo members about the issue, and one member in particular, Justin Parks, made an interesting comment; “I don’t think anyone should complain, free is free after all.”. It got me thinking; in one hand he was right. I pay absolutely nothing to help keep Twitter afloat, what right do I have to complain that it has been nearly 72 hours and I’ve been without service. On the other hand, Twitter provides a service to the public. Free or not I feel it is in some way their obligation to try and support their customer base as much as possible; if not for the users alone, at least out of good business sense.

Since my post in the thread Friday afternoon at least 30 other twitter users have complained of the same problem I am experiencing, and no further updates regarding an ETA or status of the issue have been made by Twitter their post on Friday.

What are your thoughts on this topic? Do you think free services like Twitter have an obligation to support their customers better than they are currently, or is Justin correct in the sense that if we aren’t paying for it we should just deal? Let me know what you think in the poll below. I may be doing a follow up post once service is restored and I’ll use the data collected.

So there has been a lot of buzz this week revolving around the launch of the new Twitter home page, which features trending topics that are hot at the moment, hot for that current day, and hot this week, as well as a hot this month.  But more importantly Twitter’s home page is now dominated by a search feature.  The new focus on search has people talking about Twitter being the next big thing in search when it comes to real time search and discovery engines, but in all honesty I don’t think it means a damn thing.

Sure it’s fancy, it shows trends and it’s NEW, but how many of you are actually using twitter.com to do anything that involves twitter?  Most serious twitter users are using programs like TweetDeck.  I personally use Twitterfox while on the computer and UberTwitter on my Blackberry.  The only time I ever visit Twitter.com is to add or remove people.  Unless you are visiting Twitter’s website everytime you manage your tweets I don’t see this feature being used too often.

Overall I think, much like everything in the search and social community, it’s new, it’s shiny, and it’s something to get overly excited about.  But there really isn’t any true value there yet.  Real time search is only really good for news and entertainment at the moment and even then there is no control over the value and relevance of the content presented.  On the flipside if you’re doing buzz monitoring or monitoring your brand you might find some value in this newly revamped homepage, but honestly I don’t think it’s worth the hype its getting.

What are your thoughts?  Have you used the new Twitter homepage?  Did it add any value to your Twitter experience?