The 4-1-1 on Twitter as a 9-1-1 Interface

Is Twitter the new 911? My twittering debut was in December 2007 after reading a post by a Poynter Institute columnist suggested that twittering was a great tool for journalists. My opening salvo was neither memorable nor liberating, and my tweets were fleeting. I was merely going through the motions to research this new communication device akin to an ethnographer wishing to fit in with her subjects. How this would assist me in finding leads was lost to me, I certainly didn't have time to just watch responses. Further, I found it weird that total strangers wanted to follow me -- and wondered if I should be prepared to take out a restraining order.

But my attitude changed in April 2008 when an American student was detained in Egypt. With 132 characters to spare, he typed ARRESTED, and his cadre of followers sprung into action, creating a global response team that extended from the United States Embassy to the University of California Berkeley to spring the 29-year old -- who had only sent his first Twitter message a week before.

Twitter, as everyone under 35 knows, is a community-based tool that allows people to broadcast messages to their followers – 140 characters at a time. The short bursts are perfect to stay up to speed via cell phone text messages, and are the darling of teens looking to find their peeps in shopping malls.

Or so I thought. The Egypt episode was an ah-ha moment that spurred a real interest in Twittering. The power of narrowcasting was more evident. My real conversion came in May of this year when Kwanza Hall, an Atlanta councilman, saw a woman in distress and tweeted:

Need a paramedic on corner of John Wesley Dobbs and Jackson st. Woman on the ground unconscious. Pls ReTweet

Since he is running for mayor his followers are many and they in turn called 9-1-1. He stated he tweeted versus calling the emergency response system, because his cell battery was low and was afraid of losing the call while on hold. Apparently, weeks earlier, a home in Atlanta had caught fire and managed to burn to the ground while witnesses listened to Musak. Unless the fire chief is Twittering, not sure how to get around this

In the state that bans gay marriage, San Francisco Mayor Gaven Newsome married Twitter with its 3-1-1 system. Three-one-one is the communciation system put in place to take the burden off the emergency system -- but still allowed the community to report things like car-eating potholes. The San Francisco call center will use CoTweet to manage and track tweets to its SF311.

At Gilbane I spoke with social media guru Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst with Forrester, who is a strong believer in Twitter as an emergency response interface. "The challenge with Twitter is the network," he told me. "It isn't reliable. However, it can be a great tool to interface with a city's disaster planning and response."

The nightmares of September 11 and Hurricane Katrina exposed the frailties of communications networks and the disastrous consequences that occur in their absence. Twitter might only be in its infancy, but it has proven that any one of us is a mere 6-degrees of tweets away from help in life-or-death situations.