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So, when Portland's Office of Emergency Management uses twitter to notify people of severe weather alerts, or the public transit system tweets about system brea
by kscaldef 17y ago
So, when Portland's Office of Emergency Management uses twitter to notify people of severe weather alerts, or the public transit system tweets about system breakdowns, that's not serious or important? Just because you assert it doesn't mean Twitter can't be a useful broadcast medium.
- gaius 17y agoSo when Twitter is down people die in hurricanes? I don't think so, somehow.
- johnm 17y agoAny reliance on that service for life-critical things is clearly delusion, incompetence, and downright frightening.
- kscaldef 17y agoReliance on _any_ single service for life-critical things is just as you say.
- Kadin 17y agoGiven Twitter's quality of service (which is admittedly getting better, but still pretty bad), I can't see how using it for anything but purely informational messages would be a good idea. It frankly seems downright dangerous for people to start depending on their Twitter feeds for critical information, particularly if the organizations disseminating that information start relying on Twitter rather than maintaining their own more fault-tolerant infrastructures (like weather-alert radio or the Emergency Broadcast System). I hope and suspect that Portland OEM is smarter than that, but it seems like it could be dangerously tempting for a budget-constrained agency to try and outsource broadcasting to a totally inappropriate medium.