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

How robust is Twitter

[Anonymous Coward]

Other than being accessible by different devices, doesn't Twitter still need data (either mobile or broadband)? How is this going to help much if other forms of communication are down?

Re:How robust is Twitter

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a critical emergency talking up Twitter right before the IPO alert.

Re:How robust is Twitter

[Mitreya]

doesn't Twitter still need data (either mobile or broadband)? How is this going to help much if other forms of communication are down?

If you send data in under-100-byte chunks, it can go over the downed connection. Don't you know anything about the internet? Just don't use the entire 140 byte allotment and it will work.
(that's my best explanation, let's see if someone else has a better one)

Re:How robust is Twitter

[Anne_Nonymous]

You're going to want an emergency alert to let you know that Facebook is down, aren't you?

Re:How robust is Twitter

[WillAffleckUW]

SMS was originally a derivation of the Short Messaging System used by naval ships, planes, and submarines to send burst traffic in such a way that it didn't suffer too much from interference, had optimum range, but could not be used to triangulate your position if encrypted (think of when they "trace" your phone).

So it can function over heavily impaired robust systems, in that a single packet does not have a lot of overhead (Twitter tweet).

It can even be bundled in burst packets to run over systems and pad out the strings.

Priority level determines how the packets get bundled, depending on the delivery mechanism(s).

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.

Re:How robust is Twitter

[Obfuscant]

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?

Hashtag oh no

[puddingebola]

Earthquake very strong, crushed under chunk of house, check my location on foursquare, #dying

Thank God!

[Cornwallis]

Just in time for the new season of American Idol.

why now?

[themushroom]

must... maintain... social... RELEVANCE! add... value!!

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?

Must combine with additional data...

[willy_me]

Alerts are fine so long as filters can be applied to minimize the number of people that receive them. For example, GPS coordinates could be effective at limiting the number of recipients. Add to that accelerometer data to determine if the person is moving or possibly asleep - also helpful.

Alerts must be minimized or else people will start ignoring them. It is similar to how people would just click "Allow" whenever Vista prompted them with a security warning - most people would not even read the message after seeing so many prompts. So use some intelligent filters along with sensor data to minimize the number of alerts or risk all alerts being ignored.