In the aftermath of the 9.0 quake that rocked the country, a Tokyo Apple store went above and beyond to help its people. Today Kevin Rose, founder of digg, posted on his blog an email he received from a friend in Japan. The unnamed friend is an employee at the Apple store, and relayed how the company helped out in the time immediately following the earthquake.

Since the quake knocked out much of the communication and transportation in the country, people found themselves stranded in the city. The Apple store became a hub for news gathering and place for people to touch base with their family members in other parts of the country. “People were swarming into Apple stores to watch the news on USTREAM and contact their families via Twitter, Facebook, and email. The young did it on their mobile devices, while the old clustered around the macs. There were even some Android users there,” said the Japanese employee.

The Apple store employees even provided chargers and adapters so that people could charge their devices. Even after the store closed, it still provided an invaluable service to many: “Even after we finally had to close [at] 10pm, crowds of people huddled in front of our stores to use the wifi into the night, as it was still the only way to get access to the outside world.”

Apple later told the employees, both retail and corporate, that they could sleep in the stores since transportation was still a no-go out of the city. They provided food and water and eventually let employees’ families stay in the stores as well. The theater rooms and break rooms provided enough space for all of the dispossessed employees.

The anonymous employee added, “That is why I am a fanboy. Ack!”

To read the whole email, go here.

Only use reputable sites when making donations. Established and trusted sites like the American Red Cross are the safest bets to making sure your donations are done securely and support their intended mission. You can also find other reputable charities or relief agencies through reputable and trusted publications, as it is assumed they have done the necessary research on the charities they are advertising.

However, be sure to check your spelling. Authenticity is the key. Scammers spoof reputable agencies and sites by variating the spelling slightly, taking advantage of common typos, and/or using a similar, yet different, name but mimicking the colors, logo, and layout of the reputable site. If the site doesn’t have an SSL certificate on the payment processing page, then that’s a clear giveaway the site isn’t legit. Although scammers can get SSL certificates for their spoofed site, it is difficult for them to do so and maintain the validity from any reputable SSL provider.

Lastly, use your common sense and instincts. If something seems wrong about the situation, there probably is something wrong. Carefully review what you’re doing before proceeding, and even ask someone else if you’re unsure of the validity of a site or agency.

Most importantly, don’t be discouraged by the actions of these scammers. If you feel the urge to donate, please do so. A really safe and easy way to help is via SMS text, courtesy of the Red Cross.

Telephone lines are reported to be down for most of Japan, and getting a hold of loved ones is a difficult task to undertake. As reports surface, messages from Facebook and Twitter provide the latest news. Doing a bit of research shows how the human spirit can be found within the social media platforms.

Kotaku, a video game related site, posted an interesting article concerning how many japanese video game developers are tweeting their experiences. One developer went so far as to open their studio doors to strangers, relying on Twitter to accept invitations.

Masahiro Sakurai, a famous video game developer posted a startling image on Twitter of an almost always crowded Tokyo road being completely deserted.

George Takei, a famous japanese-american actor, has been tweeting non-stop trying to inspire people to donate to the Red Cross.

Obtaining information about where to find shelters has moved to Twitter as well, with locations being posted on Google Maps. And lists of locations becoming available as well.

As WebProNews reported earlier, earthquake related tweets have been trending all morning. People have been expressing concern, and sympathy as the death and missing tolls rise.

Tsunami warnings have been issued to various locations around the Pacific Ocean, and millions of social media accounts will be staying tuned for the latest updates. Let’s hope we don’t have to receive any.

According to Symantec, malware creators have devised malicious software and websites designed to make money from concerned members of the public, by targeting specific web searches so that their sites get listed in results. Such queries include things like "western Samoa," "Earthquake," "Tsunami," etc.

When users go to these sites, they are presented with fake antivirus scan attempts, which offer to clean users’ computers. Of course they do just the opposite.

The subject is really just reflective of a larger phenomenon in which cybercriminals are preying on innocent searchers by targeting topics that are highly searched for. There’s nothing more heavily searched for than current events, and there are plenty of tools out there that give away this information. Things like Google’s Hot Trends, Yahoo’s popular searches, and  Twitter’s trending topics are generally good indicators of queries that are being heavily searched for.

"These types of attack are becoming increasingly prevalent online," says Hon Lau, Security Response Manager at Symantec. "We recently identified similar attacks following both the Serena Williams outburst and the Twitter based attacks reported last week. The people behind these scams are constantly evolving and adapting their attacks to suit current news events. Unfortunately there is no event, no matter how heartbreaking, which a hacker will not try to profit from."

Symantec warns users to be "vigilant and cautious" of any search results which appear not to link to trusted sources.

The US Geological Survey listed the quake originally as measuring 5.8 on the Richter scale when it hit the Los Angeles area this morning. Their list of recent quakes now has it at 5.4, with several smaller tremors noted.

People reached for their preferred electronic device and shared the news with their friends. Many turned to Twitter to do so; unlike previous rushes of traffic to the site, the quake and its aftershock of tweets didn’t drop Twitter off the Internet.

The LA Times tech blog composed a long list of tweets that hit Twitter in rapid succession. Though Twitter held up, the Times itself suffered a brief outage.

“‘Strong quake shakes Southern California’ was pushed out by AP about 9 minutes after people began Twittering primary accounts from their homes, businesses, doctor’s appointments, or wherever they were when the quake struck,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said on the service’s blog.

Tweetip published a timeline of tweets, with the first hitting at 2:41 EDT. Many people opted for a single word – Earthquake – in doing so.

“Twitter is simply very fast at disseminating information,” VentureBeat’s MG Siegler said. “We saw this when a large 7.8 earthquake struck China back in May and we

Google China also shows a custom search engine, made for the purpose of looking for relatives (qin ren). The Google Custom Search Engines service is part of Google’s Co-op initiative:

The link from the Google homepage has now been changed to this custom search engine:

Google partner Tianya also allows discussion of the incident at their Lai Ba community (to what extent fully open discussion is possible on partly moderated Lai Ba I don’t know):

Accompanying this, Google launched a multitude of advertisements in Google results pointing to these services. There are ads for the maps layer, the custom search engine, and the Tianya community, when entering queries like ?? (Sichuan), China earthquake and more:

Additional to the advertisements, Google is showing a special alert onebox linking out to the custom search engine, the maps layer, Google News results, and several other search types like blog search or video search:

Google.com and Google.cn also put up a donations page using Google’s payment system Checkout; this page also links out to other efforts, like the maps layer and a Google Earth layer. Google on this page also state that they will donate $2 million themselves:

Now, some people thought Google utilized the situation to promote their own products – the owner of a site dedicated to provide Chinese translations of Google Blogoscoped in a translation last week argued that (if I understand it right) Google’s homepage actions felt “cold blooded.” For those who read the translation I wanted to note I did not make or imply any judgment on the situation, and did not say these things; their blog has already added a correction to clarify this, with thanks to their helpful and dedicated team of translators (their team is located all over the world and provides many translations in their spare time). Kai-Fu Lee, President of Google Greater China, contacted us over this as well. He lists the different services Google rolled out in this situation and says many Chinese Google employees have been “working all night” on these.

The Chinese Google employees, Kai-Fu argues, “have been the most dedicated and passionate people I have ever worked with. I am proud to be working among them. But I am very saddened to see the hard work they put in not recognized, and even attacked.” He adds: “At a difficult time like this, I hope we can all turn our anxiety and sadness into real contributions”.

As an example of the kind of work Google China’s employees recently undertook, Kai-Fu tells how the Google custom search engine (CSE) came about:

[Engineering lead Harry Ke] and two other engineers came up with the idea of helping people search for lost relatives or friends. Given there are >20,000 dead, tens of thousands still trapped, and some 200,000 wounded, and many more homeless. Also, cell phone and land lines are mostly not working. Transportation is difficult because the disaster area is on mountains and valleys. So, there are many people frantically looking for lost relatives and friends.

The engineers idea was to use CSE, and add URLs of all the sites, discussion groups, tables, hospital websites, etc…. anywhere there are names of people who might be found, alive, wounded, or dead. The CSE would just report results based on these sites. A big issue is where to find all these websites, so we mobilized about 100 (…) of our employees to look everywhere for content and enter them.

We also allowed users to submit their input to us. And we included discussion groups for everybody, including our competitor’s, as possible places for them to submit input.

Kai-Fu says that Google ran into some problems as some sites were not crawled often enough by Google’s crawlers – when these sites were small, the Google team had volunteers do crawling by hand.

Update: Google China is now showing a black and white logo on their homepage. Yahoo China and Chinese search engine Baidu, among others, show gray-scale images as well. A note from google.cn is linked to help contact information, containing support numbers and addresses of charities. The note reads “2008?5?12?14?28? – ?????????????????????”, which as far as we are able to tell translates to “May 12, 2008, 14:28 – Let us always remember this moment, may the deceased rest in peace, and the living be strong.”

Comments

This isn’t to say it should have – Google is a for-profit corporation based in America, and is in no way obligated to take note of natural disasters overseas.  Still, following its response to the cyclone in Myanmar, Google’s reaction to the earthquake seems rather weak.

Google China After Earthquake

Posts documenting the cyclone and/or soliciting aid for Myanmar’s civilians showed up on the Official Google Blog, the LatLong Blog, the Google Checkout Blog, and the Google Grants Blog.  A "donate" link was put on Google.com, and donation-matching is also taking place.

In contrast, there doesn’t yet appear to be anything in English relating to the earthquake.  Philipp Lenssen only writes, "The homepage of Google China links to a special map showing [earthquake] information.  Auto-translating the homepage text results in: ‘New! Google launched an emergency situation in the earthquake map, view the latest situation in earthquake relief.’"

Again, we’re not pointing fingers.  The situation is odd, though, especially given Google’s presence in China.

I reported the major quake to my followers on Twitter before the USGS Website had a report up and about an hour before CNN or major press started talking about it. Now there’s lots of info over on Google News.

How did I do that? Well, I was watching Twitter on Google Talk. Several people in China reported to me they felt the quake WHILE IT WAS GOING ON!!!

Over the next two hours I pointed at anyone who had info about the quake on my Twitter account.

It’s amazing the kind of news you can learn by being on Twitter and the connections you can make among people across the world.

I fear a large casualty loss. The epicenter was 50 miles from Chengdu, which has about 10.5 million residents. Already reports are coming across of buildings that have been knocked down.

dtan was the first Twitterer I saw talking about the quake. This was my first post in reaction to him.

UPDATE: Online Journalism Blog has a lot more details about what happened on Twitter tonight. From the Frontline blog has even more.

UPDATE2: Global Voices Online has links to videos and other Twitter and blog reports.

UPDATE3: here’s a timeline of what first Tweets looked like.

Comments

We’ll start with the less-than-good stuff.  At the moment, a search for "earthquake london" on the American version of Google News yields links to 1,306 articles without even necessitating a scroll.  But when Kathryn Greenhill searched for the same phrase earlier (perhaps from Google News Australia), she got only a handful of stories, the most visible of which was about the likelihood of earthquakes in Israel.

View Larger Image

Impressed?  Well, neither was Greenhill.  And Patrick Altoft ran into a similar problem, writing, "There are only 2 news results on Google.co.uk related to this earthquake and none of the natural search results are related to it."

Thankfully, though, the earthquake caused no deaths, and injuries and serious damage were rare, so Google News didn’t miss too enormous a story.

Also, it seems that Google Earth (and its fans) didn’t overlook the story at all.  As Frank Taylor noted on the Google Earth Blog, the USGS earthquake-monitoring tool worked perfectly.  Furthermore, using both Google Earth and Google Maps, people like Daniel Bennett have begun putting together representations of the event.

Thankfully, there don’t seem to have been any injuries, and damage was minimal.  That may explain why there was so much activity on Twitter – some people would have had to take cover or flee the area, instead of type, if the quake had been more serious.

Still, MG Siegler wrote, “My entire Twitter screen is breaking SF earthquake news.  As I’ve said before, this is exactly what Twitter is perfect for.”  Indeed, we’ve already seen Twitter get heavy (and practical) use due to California’s wildfires; together, these events seem to represent a turning point in Twitter’s history.

Few Twitter users in California needed to wait on the local or national news to find out what was happening around them; Twitter users who live elsewhere, and would have had to wait even longer, also had immediate access to the earthquake info.

Silly uses of Twitter may persist, but that’s, in part, what it’s there for.  Recent developments have proven that the service is also “there” when people really need it.