

Journalist saved by Twitter wants to start a Twitter-driven emergency network - ilamont
http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/06/23/journalist-saved-twitter-now-promotes-web-2-0-humanitiary-network

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calvin
Operator: "911, what is your emergency?"

Caller: "Yes, Twitter is down, and I don't know what to do."

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icey
I'm honestly kind of amazed that another startup hasn't emerged to eat
Twitter's lunch.

I guess they must have an amazing marketing department, because they are down
as much as they are up, and I bet just about nobody can name a competitor.

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erickhill
Plurk (www.plurk.com) funky UI, so a slightly higher learning curve, but
pretty interesting.

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derefr
I'm currently only using Twitter as a sideblog, and Plurk's version seems
quite obtrusive. I don't understand sites' obsessions with branding their
widgets.

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fourlittlebees
You have to wonder why you'd want to base an emergency network on such an
unstable platform, though.

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shutter
An alert system's usefulness is proportional to its reach. For an online
widely distributed alert system, Twitter's one of the few services that would
fit that goal.

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nir
"distributed" in what sense? Technology-wise, Twitter is highly centralized -
and a rather unreliable center at that.

A Twitter-like UI that would simply send email to all your emergency contacts
might be a lot more reliable and much easier to scale.

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TrevorJ
Not that I think this is a bad idea...but c'mon...with Twitters lack of
reliability?

