Can Twitter help with Emergency Alerting?
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009Twitter is the latest social media phenom that allows users to broadcast messages en masse to mobile phones through SMS. Can it be relied on for emergency alerting. Recall that the channel for the alerts is still SMS and carriers do not provide channel or timestamp guarantees to be received for SMS. As such, a tweet can be received like an SMS up to days later depending on the carrier prioritization. As such, those implementing emergency alerting need to be careful that they provide as many alerting channels as they can - WiFi, SMS, Email, Web, Twitter, FaceBook, Voice, etc. This is especially important on college and university campuses where users are on any or many of these channels at once! ……………. Sue Abu-Hakima, CEO Amika Mobile.