According to The New York Observer, Twitter has now emerged as a "legitimate news aggregator." Twitter has been the topic of news and tech blogs since its launch, but its hypertrophy as an online source for news was during the attacks in Mumbai.

Twitterers were the first on the scene - long before TV and newspaper reporters.

According to CNN, 80 messages, or "tweets" were being sent to Twitter.com via SMS every five seconds. The messages provided news updates, pleas for blood donors, information about helplines, contact numbers and some were even transcribing a list of the dead and injured.

One Twitter user wrote, "Mumbai is not a city under attack as much as it is a social media experiment in action."

Source: The New York Observer