In Case of Emergency, Please Use Twitter
The Safe America Foundation, a national safety group working with the U.S. government, announced yesterday that text messaging, social networking sites, and Twitter could help families stay in touch in the wake of a disaster. Although Twitter hasn't always been known for its stability, in emergency situations when phone lines and other traditional communication avenues are down, social networking sites like it and others could turn into reliable backup methods for reaching loved ones.
Safe America is an Atlanta-based group working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) on a campaign called "Drill Down for Safety." The program's focus is to make people more aware of the alternative methods for communication which are available during emergency situations. According to the group's spokeswoman, Carla Shaw, people should pre-load emergency messages on their cell phones as well as useful communication websites. Families should also discuss among themselves how they will use these tools to contact each other if there is an emergency situation. "We want people to rehearse what would you do, and what other forms of communication would you have at your disposal," says Shaw.
For about a month, starting on September 11th and lasting through mid-October, 20,000 people are expected to participate in emergency training drills where the use of these alternative tools will be practiced. Some of the participants are volunteers who signed up on Safe America's website but the majority will be employees from major companies including UPS, Motorola, Allstate, and Office Depot where testing will be done on the companies' campuses.
For many technology early adopters, turning to a communication platform like Twitter or SMS when the landlines go down would probably be second nature, but if your friends and family don't know how to access Twitter's website, how to find and follow your account, or how to reply to your posts, then tweeting "Help!" or "I'm safe" isn't going to be all that useful. That's why it's encouraging to see a national safety group like this focusing on training large groups on how modern social networking sites and Twitter can be used to share emergency information even when you can't make a phone call. The only problem with this plan is the fact that when disaster strikes, cellular networks often go down too. That makes wireless communication - whether a phone call, a text, or something requiring data traffic - impossible. And then it's back to square one.
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We can help change what happens http://twitter.com/msgfromfuture
We believe the safety of your family is of most importance, especially during the time of a disaster. We give big kudos to Twitter and the Atlanta-based group for finding yet another way to keep everyone informed when a disaster strikes.
Just be sure you don't tweet to actually inform anyone OF the emergency, because then you turn Twitter into an EMS, and you know, that violates a patent and stuff. /sarcasm.
Reports like this and other mission-critical uses make a case for building a distributed Twitter-like network all the more important.
Twitter is possibly the least reliable form of communication out there, having people and organizations rely on one startup for emergency situations is downright dangerous.
If an organization's emergency backup plan is "use twitter" and twitter goes down, (as it does - frequently) then there are serious consequences...
Hi,i live in Bulgaria.This site Twitter is very popular,but in Bulgaria is not.All peoples look Facebook.In my account in Twitter i have only 2 peoples friends from Bulgaria!
Facebook works great this way as well.
Also...RWW webmasters....tab order for comment form takes me from website text box to header of page...very annoying!
Twitter has a good history. It is supposed to be the fastest medium to share the information across internet.
By doing this you will be sharing information not only to the people whom you care about but also the people around the world. I have been sending all the tech updates which are with the changing technology.
Also there is proper analysis of the issue which is beautifully described in my blog. Do read it if you want insight about new information.
This should help understanding:
What do you expect in case of an insured loss? Are You Disaster Ready? (hurricane, tornado, earthquake, flood, fire, etc.). President Obama gave his telling response: http://www.disasterprepared.net/whitehouse.html
How about sending an email to your loved ones? Email is more resilient to network outages than a single web site.
Though twitter can make us from disaster, we can not rely on twitter.
Twitdar is a cool emergency app that will post your GPS location automatically in intervals to your Twitter account. http://bit.ly/twitdar
This is really a great idea I am surprised it's not in wider use already.
i think people need to realize that cellular isn't foolproof when landlines aren't working... i mean... landlines definitely connect cellular and web eventually.