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."

Comments

Hope twitter has an emergency mode of its own

[Rigel47]

I remember on 9/11 all the major news sites were effectively DDoS. I hope they and twitter now have a convenient switch to flip that will, in the case of the news sites, jettison all the garbage ad content and the complex page rendering code in favor of something more textual that would result in 100x page view scaling. For twitter I would imagine dedicating 10% of their infrastructure to purely asynchronous emergency broadcasts would do the trick in such a circumstance.

Re:Hope twitter has an emergency mode of its own

[Phroggy]

I remember on 9/11 all the major news sites were effectively DDoS. I hope they and twitter now have a convenient switch to flip that will, in the case of the news sites, jettison all the garbage ad content and the complex page rendering code in favor of something more textual that would result in 100x page view scaling. For twitter I would imagine dedicating 10% of their infrastructure to purely asynchronous emergency broadcasts would do the trick in such a circumstance.

On 9/11, people were actually communicating with loved ones via Slashdot's comment system, because thanks to the heroic efforts of their admin team, Slashdot was one of the few major sites that managed to keep things running for most of the day (it wasn't entirely smooth, but it mostly worked). Serving a static-HTML version of the home page was one of the tricks they used.

A couple weeks later they posted an article describing what went on behind the scenes that day, but unfortunately I haven't been able to find a link to the article - does anyone else remember this?

Re:How robust is Twitter

[pspahn]

Twitter was an invaluable tool for organizing during Hurricane Sandy in 2012

As well, during the recent floods here in Colorado, there was only a single local news outlet providing any sort of coverage. That coverage was better than nothing, but not by much.

Twitter, on the other hand, was providing valuable information from across the area about what was going on, roads washed out, etc. Also (and likely because the floods were happening in Boulder) there were a number of tweets coming from some folks at NOAA and other related government agencies that provided links to rapidly changing conditions.

That event was the first time I ever considered Twitter to be more valuable than all other news outlets combined, simply because it also includes information from regular people (photos, accounts of what happened, etc). I was even able to find out some critical information about the roads near my family's nursery that was posted by, of all people, a guy that worked at a local brewery.

Aside from all of that, Twitter was more valuable than local news simply because the people they send out to do location reports are complete idiots many times.

Remember, it's not all about the affected people having access to information, it's also about those nearby who will be able to help if they have that information.