Ask HN: When do you use Twitter or other real-time search?

One time I was in San Francisco and we felt a fairly big shake. We were in an old building and were not certain if it was an earthquake. A quick search on Twitter showed that it was in fact and earthqake and tweets mentioned specific details about it. I looked on sfgate.com and they still didn't have anything posts (since it was just second after it happened).

I use Twitter to check for breaking news and also doing one-on-one market research.

To find out what people are saying about any specific topic/ product/ service.

I use Twitter to tell if Netflix is down or if it's just my connection.

Whenever we have a service outage from one of our providers( dns, payment gateway, AWS, etc )we check twitter to determine if it is widespread to more than just us. It is almost always more timely than the providers' own status pages.