Interesting news story here....

A young British entrepreneur has died while snowboarding in the Swiss Alps despite a mountain rescue operation played out live on the social networking site Twitter.

Rob Williams, 29, co-founder of a music company with a multimillion-pound turnover, became separated from a group of fellow entrepreneurs while skiing in blizzard conditions in the resort of Verbier and fell 20 metres down a cliff on to rocks.

Full news article here.

I didn't even know what a twitter was until a few days ago.
I have a vague idea what a Blackberry is and finally figured out these people talking to themselves were niether mental patients or deaf, but had the latest incarnation of cellphones stuck in their ears.
Am I MISSING SOMETHING? Have people forgotten the art of converssation in the present? Things like We are snowboarding on a mountain range that has been killing people since Oetz. What can we do beforehand just in case? No, it is some MTV reallity show in reverse against mother nature.
The guy was a music entrepenuer who made lots of money? Heres an oldie, but approriate song
Emerson,lake and Palmer- Oh,what a lucky man--he was.

LOL! Cruel but true.

While it's interesting that they were able to get a cell signal and send gps coords, it sounds like, yeah, he did everything wrong. Skiing away from the group, poor weather, the fall sure didn't help matters, no one had any contact info, and I wonder if he had any gear at all.

Darwin wins again.

I still don't know what Twitter is. I do however, have a distinct recollection of Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Must have something to do with the gray in my beard. Nah ..... that can't be it. Must be something I remember from history books .....

LW

RIP Rob Williams, prays are with family. Moment of silence (no tweets for the next hour).

This, I guess, is mourning in the information age.

'What are you doing'

'The fog is pretty bad, so I'm using google maps to navi my way back, it even shows the contours every 20 metr'

Twitter is like global instant messaging that can be sent from any mobile device. It's a new fad that's growing very quickly. Companies and news organizations use it to broadcast updates with links to their sites. I follow a few such as NASA, Boy Scouts (Yes, they launched a Twitter feed last Friday), and Miles O'Brian (former CNN corrispondent) Like anything in life, some folks take it to the extreme and leads to a loss of social skills. I have seen a room full of kids, all friends, standing in silence as they text messages to others, both in the room and someplace else. The Borg have arrived.

BTW, I would not be surprised that a service like Twitter finds its way into PLBs to allow lost folks the ability to communicate with their rescuers.

I drew the line at text messaging. If anyone wants to IM me, they can pick up the phone and dial me direct. Why would I want to have the next best thing to a live conversation when I am holding the phone in my hands anyways? If you just want to leave me a message and you don't care when I get back to you, and you have a mouth full of food and can't leave a voice mail, then email me. That's as far as I'll go with it. Bluetooth is just a way for all the trekie fans to go around looking like Lt Uhuru with a thing hanging out of their ear.

My next cell phone will do email, but I don't do texting or IM (are they different?). Looks like this guy had everything going for him but the weather and geography.

Ha, one of the best posts I've read in a while but this last sentence is absolutely classic! If we meet some day, I'll buy you a beer - as long as it's some place free of Bluetooth and Star Drek cellphones!

My full-keyboard phone arrives today. I'm a fairly recent convert to texting, and I like it better than talking on the phone.

It's also cheaper, and, more importantly for a survival situation, in a large-scale emergency you can get texts out even when the cell/land lines are completely crashed by the panicked crowds.

On the day of the Virginia Tech shootings the local cell system and the campus phone system were completely overwhelmed. I was still able to text my brothers almost instantaneously and receive their replies. You can also enter a text message and hit send when there's no signal. The phone will continue to search for a signal, and get the message out as soon as it finds one. I do that while hiking, to let my wife know when/where to come and pick me up.

If you are texting on a delay, isn't that pretty much email? I'd rather type from my laptop than my phone anyways.

My blackberry has email service, but corporate won't allow us text messaging service, so I email people. If my connection is fuzzy, then it will try and re-send the email repeatedly until it finally goes through. Pretty much the same thing to me in an emergency situation I reckon.

I think the only difference is that people have their phones with them more often than a computer, and all modern phones can handle text. If everyone had blackberries, then I agree that emailing is the same as texting.

"Looks like this guy had everything going for him but the weather and geography."

Skiing off a cliff in a blizzard...

The weather, geography and a few working brain cells involving self-preservation.

Smart does not equal sense.

Sue

I think we are missing the part of the report where Jason Tavaria used his phone with his GPS location and was found.
Mr Williams was likely dead within minutes of going over the cliff, but he was still located 7 hours later.

I am not saying that traveling in a blizzard through hazardous terrain is very smart, but I will give them credit for using a piece of technology well and effectively after the catastrophe happened.

Other news reports don't actually report a blizzard but just heavy fog. So again this was really just an exercise in navigating off the mountain without falling of it, back to the hotel. Both men were equipped with electronic GPS and mapping kit i.e. google maps and GPS embedded Iphones. The 'Twitter' part of the story really just seems to be down to some 'Internet entrepreneurs' attempting to get themselves some publicity.

True but then again, it looks like that was pretty much the only skill they had. Besides, what good did it do apart from helping them mop up the remains of their buddy some hours later?

Not to be a smartass but I think some folks would be better off taking a wilderness survival, first aid or mountain climbing course instead of spending all their time playing with their newest gadget. The real problem is that the younger generations are getting so immersed in the entire virtual reality thing they have a hard time separating the real world from the virtual one. The outdoors is unforgiving.

The Roman Catholic church has suggested giving up texting for Lent.Meanwhile further investigation into the METRO trainwreck near me revealed the enginer was texting constantly, and had allowed his teenage friends TO DRIVE TEH TRAIN IN PAST MEETINGS.
<SIGH> I think for lent I will ADD chocolate back to my diet. I seem to have shunned so much 'stuff' already.

I heard a report that an engineer on the other train was also texting, but was not "in control" of the locomotive. Apparently using any communications device in the cab, besides the radio, is a no-no.

"I heard a report that an engineer on the other train was also texting, but was not "in control" of the locomotive. Apparently using any communications device in the cab, besides the radio, is a no-no."

Cellphones are certainly forbidden NOW, but they weren't at the time.

The engineer operates the train while it is moving. The conductor operates the radio to talk to Ft. Worth dispatch, does the paperwork, and handles the worl that needs to be done on the ground (separating cars, checking air, etc). If that train was moving, that engineer WAS in control. Period.

I've had a few of the younger RR crew members get into my van without a word, pull out their electronic toys the moment they've fastened their seatbelt, ride two hours without saying a word, then get out without saying a word, grab their gear and go.

Sue

Yep, last I heard Engineers are there to make the train go or stop, period. They aren't supposed to be doing anything that would distract from that duty, and that would include electronic communiciations, especially personal comms.

These methods of communication may get through where a phone call cannot. I am all for good technology when it makes life simpler or less expensive. In this case it seems to have saved a life. The question remains...would they BOTH be dead if there were no cell coverage at all?

I am not on Twitter, and probably will not join, but in this case it seems Web 2.0 technology comes to the rescue.

I knew phone communications would be down after Ike (we have no landline, only cell), so I set up my cellphone to send txt messages to my Twitter, then sent my Twitter page to my family and friends so they could keep up with how we were doing during and after the hurricane. I also set up a plugin on my WordPress blog that connected it with my Twitter account, so that anything that appeared on my Twitter would also appear on my blog.

We lost cell voice communications before losing power, so I was able to blog for a while, but once power was lost, I was only able to communicate to the outside by texting to my Twitter acct, which double posted to my Twitter and blog. I haven't txt'd to Twitter since Ike.



If was in a remote area that didn't have voice, I'd certainly try txt'ing for help. But if I was going to txt to Twitter, I'd use #hashmarks in front of my keywords (e.g. #mayday #emergency #accident #help) so they wouldn't get lost in all the "drama queen" tweets. I've been hoping to get a ham license, but had difficulties with a few areas of study. But for life-threatening accidents, I think ham would be much better than Tweeting for help. I don't know if ham would have helped with the ski tragedy though.
---
An interesting side note: Once I returned online, my chess mentor told me he read about my tweets in two articles of his local newspaper. I searched his online paper and found they reported about us bartering coffee made on the campstove with a stovetop percolator, and charging our neighbors cellphones via car battery/inverter (some didn't have a car charger cable!) in exchange for ice, and one young neighbor mowed our front yard once we removed all the branches.

edit: clarification

Shreela,

Whoa, I never looked into txt-to-tweet. That would have been very useful during Ike's aftermath.

-Blast

Hi Blast. I learned that from a blog that used to post hurricane people's satellite phone emails and twitters (he mostly posts about politics now).

My mom's a big worrier, despite having been through a few hurricanes herself. So I figured if she was able to read that there were no injuries, or major damage to the house, as well as us having clean water and non-perishables with a way to cook them, she wouldn't worry as much.

They were a few hundred miles away after TS Allison, and because they couldn't get through on the phones, she had my father drive her down to check up on us LOL

A cell phone? Why would I want to carry a phone around?

A Telephone? Why would I need one of those when I could just go over and see them.

A Television? Why would I want to sit and watch moving pictures?

A radio? Why would I want to listen to people just blather on?


I understand the age of this place is skewed a little to the top but but some of you need to get out a little more.

That being said, Twitter is a mostly lame.

Its OK Harstad, I am one of the technophobic old geezers.

I am not familiar with twitters and don't know many tweeters.
I am not even sure how it is different from any other text messaging system.

So your comment about the service being lame makes me curious.
What do you find lame about it?

So, how are those animal skins you're wearing?

-Blast, in from a long day outside.

Okay, I am not sure about twitters, and I got tweeters in my speaker cabinet, but I do know that tooters have been some of the most effective communications devices in the PNW. I got to go to their production facility up in Sedro Wooley for a day, and it was at a time while they were upgrading from discrete circuits and LSICs to SMD designs. Very cool stuff back in the day.