My interest in text-messaging is feeble at best, and I really don't like telephones.

So thus far, when I've heard the buzz about Twitter, I've tended to shrug it off.  It's basically a way to broadcast bulletins to your friends about what you're doing - via SMS, IM, RSS, or a web site. 

This seems like a non-starter for me. I spend an inordinate amount of work and leisure time "doing research," by which I mean "staring into space."  I really don't want to send bulletins about this in real time - partly because these bulletins would be profoundly boring for the reader, partly because keying in these messages would cut down on the time that I could devote to staring into space, and partly because I cherish my privacy.  Though I often advocate for transparency and flow of information in the nonprofit sector, I think that the over-sharing light would go on (and stay on) if I used it on a day-to-day basis.

However, when my buddy Andy Carvin starts to speculate about the potential to use Twitter to save lives during emergencies, that commands my attention and respect.  I continue to worry that folks in the field of nonprofit technology aren't doing enough advance preparation for disaster recovery.

Here's a sample scenario from Andy's blog article on using Twitter:

Well before any disaster, groups of first-responders would set up accounts on Twitter, then mark each other as friends. After that, they might remain dormant until a disaster happens, but then they'd fire up their mobile phones and start texting each other through Twitter's shortcode. Almost instantaneously, messages would get routed to everyone in the group, allowing them to keep in touch with each other even when other networks crash.

Of course, that's somewhat of a primitive communication model of doing business. Not everyone in a given group would literally need to receive every message, and sometimes you'd need to communicate with multiple groups simultaneously. We'd need to see some extra functionality added to the system for this to happen. For example, we'd benefit from the ability to route messages to specific groups of people and contextualize them with tags. For example, a volunteer Red Cross worker who also happens to be a member of an animal rescue league might need to be able to route their posts to specific groups of people. So if they have a text they only want to send out to their Red Cross colleagues, they would text the phrase "groups: redcross" before typing the rest of their message, getting it to that specific group. The same idea could be used to send messages to multiple groups ("groups: redcross, animalrescue") or to all of your groups ("groups: all").

Sounds good to me.  As Andy points out, we could set it and forget it, until an emergency happens, and then it would simply be there, ready to use when other networks crash.




I've done a little "research" since starting this blog article, and have concluded that the upcoming Nonprofit Technology Conference in Washington, DC would be an excellent occasion for some of us to try out Twitter.  I've been worrying about how I'm going to find all the folks I want to see once I get there. Back in pre-historic days, with 200 people in attendance, it was fairly easy to ensure some face time almost everyone.  But this year's conference will probably have more than 1,000 attendees, and although the conference venue will probably have fabulous amenities it probably won't be laid out so that it's easy to seek out or run into all the folks that I want to see. 

In the past, the conference organizers have used opt-in SMS to alert us about schedule changes, and I'm wondering if we should be trying out Twitter as a way to signal our physical locations to our colleagues and friends.   "I'm heading to the hotel gym now" seems like a tedious thing to broadcast under normal circumstances, but it could be useful information for our buddies who may not have another chance to visit with us in person until the next conference rolls around. 

In order to give this a try, I have now set up a Twitter account.  If you'd like to give this a try at the upcoming Nonprofit Technology Conference, please go to http://twitter.com/deborah909 and invite me. Just put the word "blog" in the message field, and I'll know that you're referring to this article.






If you'd like to see an example of Twitter in casual use, go to the home page of Andy's blog and look for the green text box in the righthand column.  It's just below the MyBlogLog box.