Can You Tweet the Apocalypse?
A journalist got in touch with me the other day to ask how I thought Twitter can and/or should be used. My answers to three of the questions are below but what I found interesting was whether or not microblogging can be helpful in an emergency.
Part of my answer had to do with the need for critical mass within the community. I.e., one person tweeting isn’t going to be much help.
I was thinking about this earlier today while looking at the Twitter election feed (45 seconds or so of it is running in the video above). Basically, the past 24 hours are the first time I’ve really seen the possibilities of Twitter to provide real communication rather than solitary one-way tweets with the occasional response.
Most days, I see that someone just ate a muffin, or someone sends out a link and there’s not much contextualizing or conversation around it. Obviously, yesterday wasn’t most days, but it was amazing seeing Twitter (and Facebook’s friend feed) turn into a true multi-user communications tool.
Anyway, without further ado:
1. Are tools like Twitter and Ushahidi.com commonplace, or are they significant creations? What is the context for them?
It depends a bit on what you mean by commonplace and among whom you it would be common. Among first adopters I see definite use in major media and technology hubs such as New York and San Francisco, but I also see significant drop off when, for example, I go to places like Rhode Island where I spend a lot of time.
That said, we recently did some man in the street interviews in Manhattan for Naked Media and asked people whether they used Twitter. The common response was confusion. The vast majority of people we queried had no idea what we were talking about.
Various publications are using it though to push content out – e.g., Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc. – which can be useful to those that follow them but I’m not sure how useful since I imagine if someone’s using Twitter, they’re probably also using an RSS Reader which obviously gives the recipient more context before clicking through to a story than Twitter’s 140 characters can give them.
The creation’s significant, it’s just that many are still scratching their heads on how to actually leverage its significance. The SMS model would make it more ubiquitous since people are more familiar with texting and doesn’t break them out of their normal everyday rhythms. The problem there though is that Twitter is having problems providing SMS service globally.
When you consider that more people in the world, and especially in the developing world, are on cell phones rather than computers, that’s a significant hurdle to get over.
2. Do you think sites like these can be helpful in emergency situations? If so, how?
I think they can be helpful in emergency situations with a few caveats.
First, If the emergency isn’t one that requires immediate mobility, radio, television and full-fledged Web pages will be more useful.
Second, they need to work flawlessly with SMS for the very simple reason that if the emergency is a natural disaster like an earthquake, tsunami or flood, people aren’t going to be sitting at computers waiting to get their information. They’re going to be on the run. And while I have a Twitter client on my cell phone, most cell phones – especially in the developing world – aren’t capable of having that and so SMS is the only way message can be sent or received.
SMS is also important during political upheaval because governments can target Web servers much easier than they can cell networks.
Third, there needs to be a critical mass of users within the geographic area that the emergency occurs in because Twitter’s utility at that point in time relies on de-centralized crowd sourcing where information can come in from all over.
3. Finally, what is the best way to get ordinary people to start using tools like these? Are they too “advanced” to become mainstream?
The easiest way to get started is to sign up, explore and most importantly understand what your expectations can be.
For example, Twitter relies on following people, and the type and quality of feeds you receive depends on who you actively decide to follow.
So if you’re a news junkie, follow the news organizations you like. If you’re a small team working on a project, try it out and follow each other which is what Twitter was originally created for.
And finally, try out a desktop Twitter client such as Twitterific or Twhirl, or a browser add-on like Twitbin. It makes using the service much more enjoyable than having to log in to a Web site every time you want to see what’s happening or broadcast a tweet.
Michael Cervieri is a ScribeLabs co-founder and an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs where he teaches a course called Tubes, Code and Content. On Twitter, he's @bmunch.
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