The picture was taken by Twitter user , who posted the . He was on the scene before the TV cameras arrived, and was able to inform Twitter users that people had survived, and rescuers were trying to pick them up ("There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.")

There was more Twitter information, too. Plane-related tweets accounted for eight of the ten top "trending topics" (Hudson River, MSNBC, US Airways, LaGuardia, etc.) Clicking through to them led to reaction of thousands of concerned people, and brief updates from some of them about what had happened, including references to reports that everyone had survived, and officials believed a flock of birds had been sucked into and disabled two of the plane's engines during takeoff.

Google News had nothing at that early stage, and even Google Hot Trends -- which serves a similar function to Twitter's trending topics -- had nothing on crash at first.

Of course, both of these Google services and the mainstream media will catch up. But today, Twitter was on the scene right away, and caught many details before any other media outlet or major online service.