New York Times on 911

On the front page of today’s New York Times is an article about the future of 911 calls. Central to the success of the system will be message routing across various devices and platforms.

Experts are laying the groundwork for what they call Next Generation 911, which will better handle Internet-based calls, text messages, cellphone photos and other forms of communication already in common use.

Meanwhile, the current issue of the MIT Technology Review explains, “Twitter is a system that quickly matches new messages coming in from members with the followers who have signed up to receive them, then retransmits them using each follower’s preferred channel.”

Yes, we’re building a large-scale, device agnostic, message routing system—that’s the technical core of Twitter and it has many applications. However, we’re making it fun and social too. It’s the fun part that technology columnists occasionally get cranky about. But you’ve got to cut them some slack because if you’re trying to track technology and actually keep up with every new development then you’re bound to get a little overwhelmed.

Also, do you think “large-scale systems” sounds sexy?