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Twitter Launches Emergency Alerts
wiredmikey writes "Twitter on Wednesday launched a system for emergency alerts which can help spread critical information when other lines of communication are down. Twitter Alerts are designed to help communicate in natural disasters or other emergencies when traditional channels may be overloaded or unavailable. 'We know from our users how important it is to be able to receive reliable information during these times,' Twitter product manager Gaby Pena said in a blog post. Users who sign up to receive an account's Twitter Alerts will receive a notification directly to their phone for tweets marked as alerts from certain senders. Some of those able to send alerts include the American Red Cross, Federal Emergency Management Agency, World Health Organization, and government and non-government agencies in Japan and South Korea."
If you send data in under-100-byte chunks, it can go over the downed connection. Don't you know anything about the internet?
Yes, and this is nonsense. Now, I've actually had a network device that failed in a way that its MTU was around 100 bytes, but that's a very ABnormal failure mode, and simply limiting your packets to < 100 bytes isn't going to get the data over a link that has failed.
You're thinking of SMS, and none of the Twitter apps I've got on my phones uses SMS for transport. They can't, I've never told Twitter my mobile number.
The question as originally asked stands. Twitter depends on network connectivity, and in a situation where 3/4G cell connections and/or Internet are down, how will this do anything but increase the load on a system that has already failed due to overload?