We love Twitter just as much as any tech bloggers -- that should be clear to anyone who has read this blog over the past six months. But stories like this one from the AFP are a bit rankling. Writing about how Twitter had news of this week's deadly China earthquake as it happened, the AFP implies that this is a case of "micro-blogging outshining mainstream news." Outshine, as in "to surpass in splendor, ability, achievement, excellence" (Dictionary.com), is not something that I think Twitter did to the mainstream press. And the bigger issue: they're not in competition.

The only thing Twitter does better than the traditional news is speed. It doesn't do depth, it doesn't do fact-checking, it doesn't do real reporting. It does breaking news, and it does that very well -- in many cases these days better than the mainstream press (in terms of how fast it breaks news).

Twitter did indeed have news of the China earthquake before the press -- and that's not the first time it has beaten the press to a major story. It did the same for the UK earthquake earlier th