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.