Rare East Coast Earthquake Spreads Through Facebook And Twitter

News of a rare earthquake on the East Coast swept across social media sites on Tuesday, from Twitter and Facebook to Foursquare. As traditional news sources scrambled to report the seismic event, which was felt across a wide swath of the Easte seaboard, tweets and Facebook status updates have poured in from as far north as Boston and New York to North Carolina.

On Twitter, a search for \"earthquake\" yields plenty of results — both from those affected and those responding to the news. Depending on the geographic spread of your Facebook friends, it's likely your news feed is similarly buzzing with early responses to news of the natural disaster.

On Foursquare, more than 14,000 users have checked into \"Earthquakepocalypse,\" a New York-based user-created Foursquare event that while silly in nature, might be useful for tallying the number people who felt the quake. Cell phone service in affected areas was also disrupted, likely as a result of service towers overloaded by an influx of calls.

Initial reports suggest that the earthquake measured in at a magnitude of 5.9, with an epicenter near Richmond, Virginia. If you felt the earthquake, report your experience to the United States Geological Survey (USGS) to contribute to the data collection effort.