Twitter: It's Not Just For Kids Any More

I've been messing with Twitter.

In short, Twitter is used to send short (140 character) or less text messages from one person to....well, it could be anybody. One person or 10,000 people.

Originally, it was envisioned as a way for a group of friends to chitter-chatter about what they are doing at the moment...

"I'm at the mall"
"Going to see Indy Jones Movie"
"Will be @ fountain 2pm c u there"

and stuff like that.

The basic concept is that you either send a "tweet" (message) or "follow" someone's "tweets". So if you are the popular kid, when you tweet from your phone "going 2 get pizza @ jacks" maybe 20 other kids who "follow" his updates get a text message on their phone seconds after he sends it.

Silly, right?

Not so fast.

You see, along with the silly chatter, the idea of a large group communicating short, written messages, nearly instantly, with a low-bandwidth, high(er) reliability text message has some interesting applications in emergencies.

And so, the Los Angeles Fire Department started "tweeting" messages about brush fire situations. And LAFD firefighters started "following" the LAFD tweets.

And here you can see the tweets as they happen, with the web-based version of Twitter:

http://twitter.com/lafd

Example tweet:
*EXPLOSION* 1B LAX x Baggage Area 1; MAP 702-G5; FS 51; Reports of small explosion on Flyaway B... Read more at http://tinyurl.com/5a4rpn 02:05 PM September 03, 2008

Not to be left out of this is the Red Cross, with their own Twitter account:

http://twitter.com/redcross

and here's the latest Tweet from them (see the site above for the current link)

A hurricane watch has been issued for areas in GA, SC & NC. Officials as far north as D.C. urged residents to prep for heavy winds and rain.

(they also have a neat blog for updates, better than the tv news: http://hurricanehanna.wordpress.com/)

Now, remember that you can "follow" a Twitter user's announcements on your phone (or on your Twitter home page)? Well as a user, you can be "followed" or send a "direct message" to another user.

And that's something the Red Cross is doing as well - they are using Twitter for "health and welfare" traffic in affected areas.

All in all, it's a near tool with a lot of emergency management implications and uses. It solves a lot of problems in terms of user management and signup, and the mobile data services tend to work when voice does not.

Give it a try, it's nifty.

Several years ago I was a member of a scanner enthusiast group, we had a paging system set up (called “Scan-Alert”) that we would send short text messages about what was going on.

Martin, this is excellent. I had heard references to Twitter but hadn't paid attention nor considered useful applications such as you describe. Thanks.

I am sooo far behind the power curve. I seem to remember twitter as in "all a-twitter" about some gal/guy...

I can see a lot of useful possibilities, in theory.

But I don't know much about the security of this service, especially when emergency services start using it.

Being a skeptic, I have to wonder how long it will be before hoaxers, hackers, vandals and general knuckleheads start gumming up the works.

A lot of people seem to prefer to destroy rather than to build.

My 2¢.

From a 'web guy' point of view Twitter is nothing new. The technology, idea, etc isn't even new. Someone just tossed a new word at "updating a website" from a central spot that allows users to have their own accounts... L O L.

The fire departments could technically do this on their own site just as easily with a custom program, etc.

I guess the point is it's "COOL" now but in the years or even months to come does that mean the fire department, police, rc, etc are gonna jump ship and follow the trends?

An interesting approach at something that could have and should have been done already. Publish on your own site, provide XML feed, bam no need to use twitter or a 3rd party.

Wow, you totally missed the central idea - the SMS gateway services provided by Twitter and the immediate ability for ad-hoc group messaging.

We use SMS for dispatch messaging, and it takes 48 to 72 hours to get a phone number added to the dispatch list from 911. I could put an XML feed on www.ubefire.com but NONE of the members but me would even be able to pull an RSS feed to their phone.

The idea that I could invite the community to "follow" the fire company - and I don't need to know (nor care about) anything about them - I don't need to know their phone number, their carrier, if they are getting updated via the SMS, via the web, via RSS, or both.


That's the point - it's not "cool" it's "easy and effective" something that I think is often lost on technologists who often tell me how "easy" X, Y and Z is with XML SOAP PHP LAMP and all that, yet when it comes to intersecting with ordinary folks and technology, it's always some major issues and problems and the quest for perfect & easy is never ended.