Small is beautiful: Twitter your way out of foreign jail!
This blog has certainly suffered since I began my infatuation with the lil’ microblogging phenom, Twitter (hmm, maybe I should use ManyEyes to graph the inverse relationship between the number of recent “tweets” to recent blog posts…).
It’s at least partially because I like to really put some serious effort into each post on this blog, while Twitter allows me to comment on a more stream-of-conscious basis. I’ve also become increasingly impressed with the every-expanding ecosystem of derivative applications that has evolved around Twitter, which, IMHO, is a reflection of:
- how important real-time, location-based information is today
- not to mention the growing range of mobile social network applications, which I’m particularly fond of because of their potential to spawn emergent behavior/wisdom of crowds.
At any rate, here’s yet another bit of evidence for Twitter’s versatility and the serious role it can play in fast-evolving emergencies.
One of our far-flung correspondents, Pat Krolak, reports in with this CNN story about James Buck, an American grad student who’d just learned to Twitter several days before he was imprisoned in Egypt while documenting anti-government demonstrations earlier this month.
Buck was able to send a one-word (sometimes you don’t even need 140 characters!) tweet:
ARRESTED
after he and his translator were detained. That was enough to get his social network activated to liberate him. Surprisingly, Buck was able to keep his cell phone while detained, and was able to continue to send tweets. He was eventually able to send a tweet that he was
FREE
but his translator is still unaccounted for, and Buck is using his Twitter feed to update supporters and organize people to help the translator.
CNN quoted Twitter’s Biz Stone on the significance of how Buck used Twitter:
“‘James’ case is particularly compelling to us because of the simplicity of his message — one word, ‘arrested’ — and the speed with which the whole scene played out,’ Stone said. ‘It highlights the simplicity and value of a real-time communication network that follows you wherever you go.’”
This time last year I was dumping on Twitter as a collaborative effort in navel gazing, but in the interim I’ve come to regard it as an invaluable tool in disasters to share critical real-time, location-based situational awareness and reduce the load on cell phone networks.
You can bet that learning and using mobile social networking apps will be a key part of the educational program on smart use of wireless devices in emergencies that I’m designing for The Wireless Foundation
PS: This saga isn’t over: please sign the petition
for release of Buck’s translator, Mohammed Maree
Technorati tags: homeland security antiterrorism crowd-sourcing wisdom of crowds crowdsourcing smart mobs swarm intelligence emergent behavior networked homeland security collaboration location-based services geo-spatial web web 2.0 homeland security 2.0 disaster management 2.0 disaster management mobile+social+network+applications mobile social network applications disaster planning disaster planning 2.0 Twitter
