• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, February 11, 2013

Before taking the stage to deliver his opening keynote at the Social Media Insider Summit Guy Yalif, head of global product marketing at Twitter, chatted with me about some surprising and unintended uses for Twitter. Among them, he said, is that people are beginning to use it as an early warning system for natural disasters, especially earthquakes.

I told him that I heard that when the earthquake ran up the East Coast a couple of years ago, there was a Twitter tweet trail that corresponded to it. Yalif went me one better, telling me that one of his Twitter feeds if from the seismology center near his home in San Francisco.

To which I suggested Twitter figure out a way to get pets to tweet, because I’ve been told that they can sense earthquakes before they happen.