Twitter for Quickness
Internet becomes lifeline, record: "Erica Mauter, for instance, found out about the bridge collapse via Twitter. The relatively new and popular 'microblogging' site, usually reserved for cheeky and banal mini-posts ('sunburn from this weekend is starting to peel'), erupted in the Twin Cities on Wednesday as local users tweet-ed almost exclusively about the accident."
posted by Biz at 8:19 AM
3 Comments:
Same thing happened during the steam explosion in New York. Look at @howardlindzon history around July 18th to see how Howard went from exclusively using Twitter for describing his peeing habits (literally) to very serious Twittering about the steam explosion. Pretty amazing. Twitter is an emergency response tool.
Biz,
This is interesting. Perhaps Twitter could provide an alert service to people so that they can "tune in" to local events.
For example, it could be another twitter user (I just created "newslet") that people can send @ messages too.
However, this does not currently work as Twitter does not provide an option to make replies public or aggregate. So consider this a feature request for bot type twitters. =)
Twitter served as an early-warning system for many people, including myself.
I've written a comprehensive account of Twitter and other technologies' role in the citizen journalists' coverage of the disaster.
You can read it here: Minneapolis Bridge Collapse & Citizen Journalism.
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