As someone who barely uses Twitter, how did you find the information? I'm sure there is good info out there, but it's impossible to find unless you've already subscribed to follow people.

It was 2010, I don't quite remember how I did it, but it was super easy at the time. Had something to do with location searching. It was the "Buffalo City Grill Shooting". At the time I was a heavy twitter user and it was immediately obvious how I could query the app to figure out what just happened. Now I don't even have an account so I'm not sure it's still possible.

Twitter apps on mobile devices can surface near-to-you Tweets. This is incredibly helpful in emergency situations.

A couple years back there were, literally, a dozen police cars on my street and traffic blocked in all directions. I discovered on Twitter searching Tweets near to me that a man had barricaded himself in an apartment around the corner. He had a hostage and when he started lighting the apartment on fire, the SF SWAT team killed him. [0]

More info on event from The SFist. [1]

[0] https://twitter.com/galactic/status/200451986838138880

[1] http://sfist.com/2012/05/09/homicide_suspect_has_standoff_wi...

EDIT: Link layout. Spelling. Reduce number of single-sentence paragraphs. Reword fourth sentence.

My community Facebook group does a fantastic job at answering the regular "gunshots vs. fireworks" debate.

Is this really a regular debate in the US? I've never heard a gunshot in my life in Germany.