MAY 14, 2008

Twitter’s Future: Emergency Preparedness?

We’ve had some back-and-forths in the office about Twitter and its usefulness. Gayle isn’t a big fan, but others are. Until yesterday, I was inclined to agree with her: although I’m a Twitter user, I thought the signal-to-noise ratio was too low for the service to ever be anything but a neat little tool to post non-sequiturs you’d otherwise blather to your cats. For instance, here are some things I have Tweeted about: words and phrases I hate, incomprehensible instant messages from my grandmother, and a couple rants about NPR . I even Tweeted solely in haiku for a week or so.

So why have I changed my mind? Because, for the second time in a few weeks, Twitter has proven that is at least somewhat useful. Case in point: the Twitterati scooped the entire traditional media corps, as well as the United States Geological Survey (”USGS”), in reporting the devastating earthquake that hit China’s Sichuan province Monday afternoon.

Blogger Robert Scoble, who follows over 21,000 people on his Twitter account, first received and shared news of the earthquake at 11:37 PM Eastern Time - as it was actually occurring. The USGS, which has a network of seismographic monitoring stations around the world, reported it three or four minutes later, and mainstream media outlets didn’t run any coverage of the quake for nearly an hour.

Now, for a disaster like an earthquake, this insta-reporting is of limited usefulness. Sure, it’s nice to have news before everyone else does, but since earthquakes are localized events, being better-informed does not mean lives and property saved. But for other disasters, both natural and man-made, services like Twitter could prove instrumental in preventing tragedies caused by lack of critical information.

Consider the Virginia Tech shootings of a year ago: the gunman began his rampage with a shooting in a large dormitory, after which he left campus. Hours later, he returned to an academic building, where the majority of his violence was unleashed. A Twitter-like service, with students having control over the content, would certainly have broadcast the first shootings to the student body in a much more efficient manner than the school’s administration ultimately chose. And while we can’t predict exactly what would have happened had more students been armed with this knowledge, we can reasonably assume that some would have stayed home and fewer people would have been in danger that day. Twitter is uniquely positioned for emergency use - the short message format forces posters to get directly to the point, and the character limits and simple design allow for quick loading of pages at times when networks become clogged by a panicked, information-seeking public.

So my final verdict on Twitter? I don’t have one yet. Although it has proven useful in this and a few other cases, it’s still too populated with the inane details and observations of the lives of people like me. I think the low signal-to-noise ratio of services like Twitter is what keeps them from becoming mainstream: people’s lives are cluttered enough without the ephemera of my existence cluttering them even more - so when the signal finally gets through and valuable information is passed on, few are actually there to hear it.

What do you think? Do you use Twitter? How has your life been enriched by this service?