Tweeting in Tornadoes

This week, the blog for discussion will be In Case of Emergency, Please Use Twitter.

The blog, published on ReadWriteWeb, tells us what we already know: if you're in the middle of natural disaster, you should tweet about it.

The basic premise behind the blog is that a storm of suffecient strength will knock out "traditional communication avenues", leaving us with only Twitter and, I suppose, smoke signals to get across our messages. And fires are hard to start during a typhoon.

The problems with this approach as so self-evident that even the people proposing it realized that it might not work. For example, in situations where your family doesn't actually use Twitter, the site "isn't going to be all that useful". Similarly, tweeting "Help!" probably also isn't going to help, which brings up the question of what exactly you tweet. My guess is "Oh my God there's a-" in the case of hurricanes.

If only he had typed faster.

Unfortunately, the blog supposes that if you Tweet just right, you'll save your children, grandparents, and particularly intuitive pets. It ignores a few key problems. First, in their minds, the storm knocks out all of the phone lines, but doesn't affect electricity at all. Or, for that matter, internet connections that are based off of phone lines, like most internet connections. But say, for the sake of argument, that your electricity and internet connection are the last surviving technologies in the post-disaster area. This leaves you with the apparent disaster-informing tool of choice, Twitter.

Unfortunately, as it turns out, Twitter may actually not save you. For example, Twitter's unfortunate tendency to go down as soon as three people worldwide log on at the same time, leaving you with the fail whale as the only survivor of the disaster.

Repopulate the human race, fail whale!

I guess we're stuck without a way to communicate with the people within a couple of miles of us in the case of a storm. If only we had ways to travel faster than walking around aimlessly. If only, we could warn people without using the internet or phones at all!

But alas, we have only what we have.