Los Alamos evacuee Gordon Spingler is no tech slouch. He kept up with the Las Conchas Fire via text messages and emails while living with his son and other family members in Santa Fe last week. He also watched TV.

But the 77-year-old noticed something as he prowled for updates: Two of his grandsons consistently scooped their elders.

"They were way ahead of us. And we thought we were pretty sharp," Spingler said Friday, chuckling.

That's because his grandsons were relying on friends' status updates on Facebook.

The speed of information impressed Spingler. Facebook, which has 750 million members worldwide, added one more last week when Spingler signed up.

"I'm still learning how to use it," he said.

Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, the flow of information about the Las Conchas Fire was measured in minutes last week, not hours or days, cheering a variety of folks — from homeowners worried about their property to lab workers to news junkies transfixed by the latest huge story.

What a difference 10 years makes, said Craig Martin. Los Alamos County's open space and trails specialist can't help but marvel at how quickly information ricochets around the Internet in 2011 compared to 11 years ago, when the Cerro Grande Fire burned 48,000 acres and destroyed 235 homes.

"Getting information out, it is light years ahead of Cerro Grande," Martin said. "There are so many ways to communicate with people. It's pretty overwhelming if you're obsessed with it like I am."

In a world where more and more people want up-to-the-minute news updates, social networking sites are becoming go-to sites for near-instantaneous news and as resources for people looking to help, and the Las Conchas Fire was no exception.

In the past week, two former residents of Los Alamos started a Facebook group to keep people up to date on the fire. It has grown beyond their wildest predictions, they said. Meanwhile, hotels have used social networking sites to reach out to Los Alamos evacuees to alert them to discounted rates. And a sizable portion of traffic has come from Facebook and Twitter to an online site created June 27 to match evacuees with people willing to open up their homes, the site's creator said.

As of Friday, more than 900 of the 8,000 visits to helplosalamos.com came from the social networking sites and their mobile apps on smartphones, Kerri Couillard, the Web developer, said Friday.

Even the team managing the fight against the Las Conchas Fire has embraced social media, turning to Twitter to get the latest news out.

"Twitter has gotten a wide audience," said Michelle Fidler, a public information officer with the Southwest Area Type I Incident Management Command.

During big events, Americans traditionally have turned to newspapers and TV and radio stations for information. And that's still true. Sixty-three thousand of the 184,000 visits to The Santa Fe New Mexican's webpage from June 26 through June 30 came from people who typed the paper's website URL into the address bar or had it bookmarked. Google searches were the second largest generator of visits.

Only 3,766 visits came from Facebook, but that was the eighth largest of 50 sources generating visits. Twitter ranked 13th.

How social media, in particular Facebook and Twitter, has reshaped the way Americans communicate with one another is a much-discussed topic among scholars in academia, in books and in essays.

On one level, Facebook and Twitter represent a 21st-century twist on an age-old human urge to congregate. Think of being on Twitter and Facebook as hanging out at a virtual coffee shop or a water cooler, especially when big news happens.

The flow of information

Anyone who has spent a few hours in front of a computer or phone screen watching a Twitter feed or a stream of Facebook status updates knows how much information can flow when a big news event occurs. If you are connected to hundreds of people and news outlets, a new "tweet," or status report, will display every second or so. It could be a photo, a video or an audio track from someone on the scene of the incident. Or it could just be another curmudgeon opining about the latest outrage.

John Fleck, a veteran reporter at the Albuquerque Journal, has used Twitter from its inception and has noticed a change in how it is used during big news events.

"We saw Twitter as a news tool really come into its own with the big freeze and gas outage," Fleck said of the snowstorm that blew through New Mexico with an arctic blast in the first week of February, leaving an estimated 32,000 homes and businesses without natural gas for several days. "In a newsroom, you are always trying to hear from as many people as you can. You try to filter out the bad information."

With the big freeze, "you had all these people tweeting from their front porches, sharing photos," Fleck said. "You dramatically expanded your pool of information."

That up-to-the-minute stream of information in multiple formats — photo, audio, video, text — isn't a gimmick, but a revolutionary tool that lowers the barrier for everyday Americans to participate in a broader conversation, one university professor said.

"It used to be the person who had the power was the person who had a printing press," said Robert Hernandez, an assistant professor at the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California, during a telephone interview. "These days when you buy a computer, you get the book and you get the printing press for free. You get to participate in and shape the conversation," Hernandez said, referring to another Internet scholar, Clay Shirky.

Of course, in the event of a major news event, many of the tweets and Facebook status updates will contain links to news stories from newspapers and other media. And, yes, sometimes faulty information mixes in with your Facebook and Twitter feeds, but the positives of social networking sites vastly outweigh the negatives, Hernandez said.

"The beauty of Twitter is if you retweet something you inherently attribute the photo," Hernandez said, referring to when a Twitter user sends out another user's tweet to his or her followers. "People will correct things that are wrong."

Staying updated from New York City and Colorado

Rikki Reich, for one, is thankful for Facebook.

One of 25 professional and amateur photographers whose work was purchased by the Smithsonian Institution for a collection about the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Reich lives in New York City. But she went to high school and college in New Mexico. So she was captivated when Sidney Monroe started posting reports of the Las Conchas Fire on his Facebook page.

Monroe owns a gallery in Santa Fe with his wife, Michelle. And he is a firm believer in social networking sites. The only source of information in the first few hours of the fire came from social media, he said. Eventually, as the fire grew, he started posting items on how people could help firefighters and other items.

"He's been instrumental in keeping me up to date," Reich said in a telephone interview. "I feel really helpless being in New York with what's happening to my home state."

Rachel Pearson, meanwhile, is happy to have Twitter.

The Los Alamos resident and Internet business owner is in Telluride, Colo., with her husband and baby. As soon as she learned of the fire on Facebook, she hopped on Twitter, similar to what she did when she learned of Osama bin Laden's killing earlier this year.

"I have gotten so much," the young mother said in a telephone interview. "Everyone will post links of the most interesting stories. I haven't turned on the TV at all."

There is a downside, however.

"I am supposed to be on vacation, but I find that I am checking Facebook and Twitter constantly," she said.

A Facebook page to keep people up to date and raise money

Like Reich and Pearson, Gina Brown of Des Moines, Iowa, and Nicole Kofoed of Thornton, Colo., felt intimately connected to the fire and its consequences. They used to live in Los Alamos. Hoping to connect to old friends, they started a Facebook group called "Friends of LA-Fire Updates" early Monday morning.

There were no grand ambitions at work.

"We began the group with approximately 30-40 friends of ours and thought that we would end up with a group of around 100 members," they wrote in an email to The New Mexican. "By dinner time we found there to be over 1000 members of the group."

By Friday afternoon, the group had grown to more than 3,700 members and had morphed into part information booth, part forum matching evacuees to available rooms and homes, and part fundraising destination.

"Just want to let you all know how you've helped. Over 200 pairs of socks, 300 + tubes of ChapStick, 200+ bottles of Visine, sunscreen, cases and cases of energy drinks, razors and some candy. I am making a run to Abq for more 'stuff'. Thank you all!!!!!" Rebecca Feller Jones wrote on the Facebook page.

Jones said later in an interview on Facebook that all the funds raised for items needed by firefighters battling the blaze were donated because of the "Friends of LA-Fire Updates" page.

"This page and whoever created it are brilliant," she wrote.

Connecting through Friends of LA-Fire Updates

Lisa Brenner of Los Alamos knew nothing of the "Friends" Facebook page. But it would end up playing a role in her life.

A widow, Brenner lost her husband in January. When the fire forced her and her four children to flee their home, it was almost too much, she said Friday evening.

As she evacuated, she posted a Facebook status update about her situation.

Meanwhile, in Rio Rancho, Paul Rhien was having trouble concentrating at work. He and his family had moved away from Los Alamos a year ago, and he was distracted by the havoc wrought by the fire.

Then he read of Brenner's situation in a friend's Facebook status update.

"My family moved from our apartment two weeks ago (buying a home), but still hold the lease until the end of July," Rhien wrote The New Mexican in an email. "It seemed like the right thing to do to open ... the apartment for this family — our empty apartment fit exactly what they were looking for."

Rhien called Kristin Derr of Albuquerque, a friend of one of the creators of the "Friends of LA-Fire Updates" page. Derr was keeping a list of available rooms and homes for evacuees. It had grown since she and a few others originally posted availabilities on the Facebook page.

Fifteen minutes after calling Kerr, Rhien was on the phone with Brenner, telling her how they could connect once her family got to Rio Rancho.

Brenner is still taking in her situation.

"My children lost their father. We're still in recovery. For (the fire) to happen, we feel slam-dunked," Brenner said in a telephone interview. "At the same time, we are getting a lot of help from neighbors and people we didn't even know, like the Rhien family. It's sort of amazing."

Contact Trip Jennings at 986-3050 or at tjennings@sfnewmexican.com.