Scientists at the US Geological Survey (USGS) monitoring the Twitter micro-blogging service to gauge real-time public reactions to earthquakes have looked at New Zealand tremors.
The technique has already been tried on a magnitude 5.1 earthquake that shook the lower North Island on December 9, the BBC reported.
Researchers found that the bigger the quake, the bigger the spike in Twitter traffic - creating a potential tool to help instantly judge the severity of the tremor and guide emergency services to the most affected areas.
Twitter, which allows users to send messages up to 140 characters long, has grown rapidly in popularity since it was launched in August 2006.
Dr Paul Earle of the USGS emphasised that Twitter will only ever be used to supplement existing sources of accurate scientific data, but noted that traditional data-sources could take up to 20 minutes to come on-stream.
"It is a speed versus accuracy issue," he said.
"Twitter messages start coming out in the seconds after an earthquake whereas, depending of the region, scientifically derived information can take 2-20 minutes," he told BBC News.
Dr Earle described the Twitter Earthquake Detection project at the American Geophysical Union's (AGU) autumn meeting, the world's largest annual gathering of Earth scientists.
He said that sharing their experiences is one of the first things "tweeters" are most keen to do following a quake.
A spokesman for GNS Science in Lower Hutt, which works with the GeoNet network tracking earthquakes in New Zealand, said it had a close relationship with the USGS and was watching its Twitter analysis with interest.
Typical messages after a magnitude 5.1 event offshore of New Zealand earlier this month included:
* Wellingtonians - was that an earthquake or just a very big truck going past our building?
* that was a bigger earthquake the mirror shook in the bathroom and the floor moved ..... Scared :(
* Just had a Earthquake, biggest one ive ever seen, not huge, but enough to really shake our house and everything on my desk, good old NZ
* My monitors were shaking like the water in Jurassic Park, kinda awesome. #earthquake #wellington
"Twitter provides a stream that dumps out the tweets continuously," said Michelle Guy, a software engineer working on the USGS project.
"We put a filter on that stream, looking for key words like `earthquake' or `quake'. We download it 24/7."
The USGS continuously collects, and stores the tweets.
When the national seismic network detects a quake, the new system then checks back to see if there was a significant increase in messages following the event.
If there was, it can send interested scientists emails that summarise where the tweets were coming from and the text from a sample of them.
The USGS development team conceded the filter had to be tuned to ignore references to the popular video game "Quake" and an ice cream known as the "Oreo Brownie Earthquake".
"Because there is a lot of noise in this data and we don't believe this system could ever be used to initiate a critical response such as shutting down a nuclear power plant, but what it may do is give us an initial heads-up in a region which doesn't have a dense seismic network that further scientific evaluation is needed," said Dr Earle.
A paper describing the project will be published soon in Seismological Research Letters.
