With a new product called Vine, Microsoft is tackling the issue that, in the Digital Age, contact management is no longer static--where you are and what you're doing at a given moment can matter just as much as what your cell phone number is. But instead of focusing on roving business travelers, Vine's slant is community management and emergency preparedness. It's in a private beta test right now.
Here's how it works. You download a "dashboard" application, and then you log in with your Windows Live account. Its interface takes the form of a map, where geo-tagged notifications pop up if a news story or public safety announcement--sourced from 20,000 news sources as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)--happens in a specific location. (You can set preferences to only display stories from locations and areas of interest that you care about.)
Your contacts are also listed on the dashboard, where you can check out alerts that they've sent you or even just keep tabs on their Facebook status messages. "Alerts" pop up like instant messages (or text messages, as you can opt to get them on your cell phone). You can also "check in" to let your neighbors know you're at home safe if, say, there's a tornado on the rampage outside, or if you're out of town.
Existing real-time, find-who's-where applications typically have a nightlife slant, like Buzzd and Foursquare. But Microsoft hopes that the same tools of convening can be used to organize community activities and stay in touch in the event of an emergency.
The company has unveiled the product in its home city of Seattle, and, according to the Seattle Times, plans to beta-test it there in addition to a rural Midwestern town and an "isolated island community," which makes the whole thing sound just a little bit Dharma Initiative. Just a little.
All joking aside, the Web's biggest players are gunning for a way to appropriately harness social media for emergency preparedness. Google's nonprofit Google.org arm has launched a project called Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disaster (InSTEDD) with similar goals, and Google has invested $5 million in it. InSTEDD does not have a live software product yet, but organizers have said that it plans to use, among other things, a mash-up of SMS alerts and the Google Earth mapping application.
PROFNET EXPERTS ROUNDUP: California Wildfires
Following is a list of experts who can discuss the California wildfires:
1. MICHAEL BROWN is former director of FEMA and spokesman for COTTON COMPANIES, one of the nation's leading providers of disaster recovery services... Cotton has responded to such high-alert disasters as Hurricane Katrina...
Heckuva job.
(Credit:
NASA/MODIS Rapid Response)
Disasters are social: They affect large groups of people, all thrown together by circumstance or location. So when I was at a dinner with Laughing Squid founder Scott Beale two weeks ago and he said, "The next disaster will be Twittered," I thought he was spot on. What better use could there be for a social media site like Twitter than to support people with a dire need to connect to each other and share information?
So how's social media doing in the current disaster, the Southern California fires (aerial pictures)?
As Allen Stern reports in Center Networks, many social media sites, like YouTube and Flickr, have impressive collections related to the fires. That's not exactly useful if you're in the middle of evacuating, although I don't think that homeowners will be scouring these visual reports once they have to start dealing with their insurance companies.
Wikipedia's SoCal fire page is getting updated frequently but is more encyclopedic than useful for people who need on-the-spot information.
Mark Hopkins on Mashable points out that the most useful social site during the fires is, in fact, Twitter. KPBS and the L.A. Times are sending updates out over their own Twitter feeds (in Twitter, "follow" KPBSNews and LATimeFires. These are professionally-collated news feeds, and in this instance the mainstream media seems to be doing a great job of fulfilling the public trust to keep people up to date on information that could save their lives.
Mainstream media is using social platforms to get the word out.
Not that the collecting Twitters from nonjournalists in the thick of the action wouldn't also be useful. But for the social angle to work, the voices need to be organized somehow. Unfortunately, while Twitter allows you to "track" topics and people, there is, to my knowledge, no agreed-upon keyword that people can use to indicate that a Twitter post is related to the fire. Media outlets would do a service to their communities by publicizing a keyword for people to use.
However, Web entrepreneur Nate Ritter is running a useful and sober Twitter feed on the SoCal fires (follow NateRitter. He's tagging all his posts "#sandiegofire.")
I would recommend that Southern California residents monitor these feeds from their computers or their mobile phones. Here are links to the mobile-friendly pages of the feeds mentioned (anyone connecting over a slow link might also find these useful):
- L.A. Times: m.twitter.com/latimesfires
- KPBS: m.twitter.com/kpbsnews
- Nate Ritter: m.twitter.com/nateritter
The L.A. Times also created a useful Google Maps overlay showing where the fire's hot spots are.
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