If there was any doubt before, yesterday’s plane crash in the Hudson river provided ample proof of how useful Twitter can be for emerging news. Here’s a truly amazing photo that @jkrums snapped and linked to via twitter while his ferry was en route to help:

Three minutes earlier than that, @manolantern sent out what appears to be the first tweet on the plane crash:

I just watched a plane crash into the hudson rive in manhattan

I love how our earliest news is most certainly going to contain typos from now on. Same case with Mike Wilson (@2drinksbehind) who in December twittered about being in a plane crash. Understandably he put it quite strongly:

Holy fucking shit I wasbjust in a plane crash!

I enjoyed his followup tweet just as much though:

You have your wits scared out of you, drag your butt out of a flaming ball of wreckage and you can’t even get a vodka-tonic. Boo

Twitter truly connects us to the experiences of others – and terrific first hand news is just part of the fun. While I hope there are no plane crashes in my future, you can follow my own twitter updates at @crasheral (gee, hope I’m not tempting fate with that twittername).