Twitter's New Ad Claims It's Faster Than An Earthquake (VIDEO)

Twitter's new promotional ad claims that tweets travel faster than seismic waves.

When a 5.8 magnitude quake struck Virginia on August 23 and rumbled its way up and down the U.S. east coast, even making its way inland, people immediately took to Twitter to alert fellow microbloggers. According to Twitter new video, tremors from the Virginia earthquake took 30 seconds to reach New York, which apparently is "plenty of time to tweet."

In fact, hours after the quake, Twitter's official feed (@Twitter) announced that a surge of 40,000 earthquake-related tweets flooded the network within 60 seconds of the quake striking. "And, we hit about 5,500 Tweets per second (TPS). For context, this TPS is more than Osama Bin Laden's death & on par w/ the Japanese quake," read one of the tweets.

Twitter's 46-second ad is a more tongue-in-cheek presentation of those same data. The video shows a New York young man (played by Twitter software engineer Danny Hertz, according to AdWeek) reading a book at a break-room table. The man looks away from his book to check an alert on his phone, then calmly lifts his coffee cup off the table and resumes reading. Barely a second later, the room starts shaking. The young man holds his coffee cup over the table--as pillows and dish towels inexplicably fall around him--until the temblor passes, then he puts his cup down and sighs without moving his eyes from the page.

The ad, uploaded to Twitter's YouTube Channel on August 26, has been panned for being "boring" and "insensitive."

See out the video for yourself, and tell us what you think via our QuickPoll (below).

For a less snarky take on how quickly tweets spread in relation to the August 23 quake, check out Social Flow's amazing interactive infographic.