The Monkey Shack

Twitter once again demonstrated its power when it became the primary source of information in the moments immediately following yesterday's plane crash of US Airways 1549 into the Hudson River.

Janis Krums, or perhaps now better known by his Twitter alias jkrums, set off an Internet frenzy Thursday when he posted this image (left) of passengers huddled on the wings of the plane moments after the aircraft had plunged into the icy Hudson River. Snapping the photo with his iPhone, he then uploaded the image to TwitPic.com and sent out a Tweet at 3:50 PM that read "There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy."

After posting his photo, Krums disappeared from the Web to help the survivors. Meanwhile, nearly 40,000 Web users viewed the photo in the first four hours. As of the time of this post, the photo had been viewed almost 180,000 times. It has also become one of the landmark photos of the story and has been picked up by media outlets from all around the world.

Twitter users set up groups to follow the news as eyewitness reports lit up the service. "My brother just saw the US Airways #flight1549 slowly land in the Hudson river from his office in 35th floor in Times Square," read one Tweet, using the Twitter hash code to add the message to a group.

Krums was not the only citizen journalist that helped provide crucial information to the story. A Flickr search for the words "plane" and "hudson" yields 1700 results. One early image taken by Queens resident Gregory Lam shows the plane bobbing on the river’s surface, its wake still visible, before rescue arrived.