Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

See a slideshow of my San Bruno pipeline explosion photos here.

See my San Bruno pipeline explosion set here.

I took these photos on the morning of September 19th of some of the damage from the San Bruno PG&E pipeline explosion. As of this morning, most of the disaster area is still heavily guarded by various law enforcement agencies.

More from wikipedia.

The 2010 San Bruno pipeline explosion occurred at 6:11 p.m. PDT on September 9, 2010, in San Bruno, California, when a 30 inch steel natural gas pipeline owned by Pacific Gas & Electric exploded in flames.

The loud roar and shaking led some residents of the area, first responders, and news media to initially believe that it was an earthquake or that a large airplane from nearby San Francisco International Airport had crashed. It took crews nearly an hour to determine it was a gas pipeline explosion.[

Reports about the number of deaths are conflicting. According to the San Bruno chief of police seven were dead and six were missing as of Saturday September 11, but the coroner’s office questioned the information from the police department, stating only four deaths were confirmed. Many were hospitalized with injuries. 37 homes were destroyed by the blaze, with about 8 badly damaged. USGS registered the explosion and resulting shock wave as a magnitude 1.1 earthquake. Eye witnesses reported the initial blast “had a wall of fire more than 1000 feet high”.

When I logged into Twitter this morning I noticed that my account had been integrated with the new version of Twitter. It’s my understanding that Twitter is rolling this out to everyone over time. Everyone may have it by now, or maybe my turn just turned on for my turn this a.m. Whatever the case, I’m really digging the new version.

Above is a screen shot which what a flickr set link looks like in Twitter now. In the past if you pasted a link to a photo or a set on Flickr it would just be a text only link. Now you can actually expand the tweet and in the right pane a rich media panel shows up detailing your flickr photos visually. That’s very slick. Sets especially are rich, with the ability to actually watch a mini slideshow version of the set right on Twitter itself.

I’m not sure yet if there is a way to automatically push daily Flickr uploads to your Twitter stream, or what this might even look like, but I’m really enjoying the ability to manually post more media rich links to Twitter.

I did use the tool on Flickr to link my Flickr/Twitter accounts, but I think this is more about giving me a special email address to tweet mobile flickr images than it is to auto publish my images like I have done in the past at Buzz or Friendfeed.

Geotags on photos it would appear now can also be included now on photos on Twitter. I haven’t exactly figured this out yet and am not sure if it will happen automatically on flickr geotagged photos or not, but this second screenshot of my friend @Troy (who works at Twitter) shows a recent photo of his dog @JPG’s account (who is now tweeting too) which shows what the geotag embed looks like.

One of my chief complaints about Twitter over the years as a photographer is that Twitter never did photos all that well. While sites like FriendFeed and Buzz provided a richer visual media experience, Twitter was always all text based and I never felt it particularly did a good job showing off photos. This new Twitter design though is pretty massive in terms of improving the visual appeal of Twitter for both myself and I’d think other photographers.

I’m actually using Twitter more and more these days based on some of the great new features like this that they’ve been rolling out. I also love their recently launched suggestions feature — which is probably the best suggestion feature I’ve ever seen on any site on the web. I’ve found Twitter suggestions to be far more spot on in terms of suggesting new people that I might want to follow. Ever since they launched this feature it’s been daily serving me up fresh and relevant suggestions on who I should follow. Many of the people are people that I was completely unaware I wasn’t even following. By contrast suggestions on other sites like Buzz have been far less relevant for me.

Congrats to Twitter on the newtwitter. It’s a great new improvement to the site.

You can follow me on Twitter here.