The messages began flowing soon after the quake hit the country.
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Urgent. In Constitucion an eight-year old boy named Ivan Lara showed up alone. He’s looking for his family, stated a post on Twitter.
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Urgent. If someone needs a ride to Concepcion call … will be traveling tomorrow and there’s room in the car, tweeted another user two minutes later.
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And 20 seconds after that, another person posted a link to a Web site with a list of supermarkets still open in the central-south region of Chile.
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Chile’s population at 16.7 million is less than the New York metropolitan area, but the Pacific Coast nation ranks fourth worldwide in terms of social-networking penetration among its home and work Internet audience, according to comScore, a market research company specialized in online audiences.
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Since Saturday’s quake, traditional media here have focused on hard news — death tolls, rescue efforts, government announcements and images of lootings — while social-networking tools such as Twitter, Facebook and some Google applications have been at the forefront of transmitting highly localized information.
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Top message topics are about finding families and friends, food and water, and ways to get transportation.
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The coastal city of Constitucion has been virtually cut off from the rest of the country. There is no air, bus or train service.
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Karla Ramos, a nurse in a Santiago hospital, posted a Facebook message Saturday to her family living in Concepcion. She heard nothing at first because the lack of electricity there meant there was no Internet service, but she finally heard back Sunday.
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The first thing college professor Ricardo Martinez of Santiago did on Saturday, once electricity was restored in his neighborhood, was to post a message on his Facebook account.
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Cellphone lines were jammed and I wanted to let all of my friends know that my family and I were doing fine, he said….