At 2:28 yesterday afternoon, I had stopped off at home in Beijing’s Central Business District after lunch and was writing an email to a VC friend of mine when I suddenly felt dizzy. For the first few seconds, I thought it was all in my head, but then there was the distinct sensation of physical movement. I asked my wife, “Is this an earthquake?” She was incredulous at first, but then found she almost lost her footing and held a wall for support. “It is an earthquake,” she said. I looked out the window toward the new office towers going up south of my building, and could have sworn I saw them swaying. We talked for a couple of seconds about what we should do–whether we should get under a doorway, or get downstairs. Then it all stopped, about 35 seconds afterward.

I had Twhirl, my Twitter client of choice, on my desktop, and immediately typed, “Did anyone else in Beijing just feel that earthquake?” The client refreshed “tweets” from others, and there were at least half a dozen comments before mine about the quake. Amazingly, I saw that there were people from Shanghai who’d felt it too.

My first instinct after that was to look at the U.S. Geological Survey website to see whether it had been reported yet. Clicking on “Outside of the U.S.” I saw a big red square on a map of Asia in what I could see was Sichuan Province, and it hadn’t been written up yet–it had happened only minutes before, and there wasn’t an entry on it yet, so I quickly filled out a report on what I’d experienced, still incredulous that I’d felt something from a quake I reckoned was probably well over a thousand kilometers away.

Right away, guys like Robert Scoble, the uberblogger who’s a huge evangelist for Twitter and is followed by over 20,000 people, were “retweeting” messages from people on Twitter in China. Within an hour or so, using Twitter location and search tools, people had identified two English-speaking young men, and soon after a third, who were using Twitter in Chengdu, about 95 kilometers east of the epicenter. Their eyewitness accounts, with aftershocks reported in near-real time and reassuring accounts that the damage — at least in Chengdu — didn’t seem severe, were really useful.

It wasn’t long before, within the community of Twitterati watching the horrors of the quake unfold, self-congratulatory messages popped up, talking about how Twitter was so much faster than the mainstream media, and how Twitter had proven itself indispensable. At first I was caught up in that feeling, too. But really, thinking back now on what happened, there was a little too much hubris in the rush to pronounce that Twitter’s moment had arrived.

Sure, in the immediate moments after the users in China — mostly in Beijing and Shanghai — felt their buildings sway, we were able to get it out that there had been an earthquake. We didn’t know where, though, until we went to more informed sources like the USGS. I for one thought that it had been somewhere much closer by — in Hebei Province, or perhaps in Inner Mongolia.

Twitter’s immediacy was nice, but by no means unique. The whole time I was twittering, my wife was on her instant messengers, with both QQ and MSN Live open. She was also monitoring all the portals’ news flashes on the quake. I didn’t feel like I had any more information than she did

Twitter’s public nature was of some real value both for ordinary folk and for professional journalists, who were able to quickly identify English-speakers on the scene who could be interviewed. The broadcast nature of Twitter, while it can bore one to tears when used to gratuitously announce one’s pedestrian comings and goings, was in this case something that made it better than simple IM.

The other dimension to Twitter that proved very useful in this case was its global usership: there were lots of Chinese messages I was following, and I was among many people bilingual individuals translating more useful, insightful, or interesting tweets from Chinese into English. Call it “bridge microblogging.”

It proved very useful as a means of quickly disseminating information gleaned from the mainstream media on the scene: Through the night, as the death toll numbers rose with horrific speed, people I’m following reported and provided links. Many people linked to the Chinese Red Cross donation page, which was again a good implementation of Twitter.

On balance, though, I feel there’s something fundamentally unsettling that attention within the Twitter community should have shifted at all off the matter at hand and on to a celebration of the particular communication tool we were using. There’s no doubt that it was useful, but by no means did this episode drive a nail in the coffin of traditional media, which by my lights has been exceptionally good in its reporting — Xinhua, Phoenix, CCTV, and many other Chinese news organizations have really taken full advantage of the candor Beijing seems to be allowing and encouraging.