Australia's firefighters are apparently a bit worried about the future of emergency services, after rescuing two girls trapped in a storm drain who turned only to Facebook to ask for help.
According to southern Australia's Metropolitan Fire Service, it received a "Triple Zero" emergency call on Sunday. (That's Australia's equivalent to 911.)
(Credit:
MFS)
The person who called said that two girls, ages 10 and 12, were trapped in a drain in Adelaide. The girls had a mobile phone with them, but opted to ask for help through their Facebook profiles, rather than dial Triple Zero.
"It is understood that friends of the girls were alerted to their predicament via a social networking website, which had been updated from a mobile telephone the girls had with them while in the drain," the MFS said in an e-mail. "It is believed the girls had been in the drain for quite some time. The sun had already set and conditions were dark."
Firefighters responded after they received the call and brought the girls to safety.
Nonetheless, firefighters weren't exactly pleased with the whole situation. Since emergency services are only available by dialing Triple Zero, the firefighters couldn't have known the girls were in the drain until someone called. The organization is even more concerned that contacting social networks, rather than dialing Triple Zero, will become a trend.
"While the MFS is pleased the situation was safely resolved, the MFS is urging all people, especially young people involved in an emergency, to always call Triple Zero for a guaranteed emergency service response," an MFS representative said in an e-mail. "Calling Triple Zero should always be the first communication people make during an emergency, as time is critical. Social networking sites rely on friends being logged on, noticing a message and taking a message seriously enough which potentially could lead to a dangerous delay."
The concern over people using social networks for help is a real one.
Last year, a father of a missing girl asked Twitter users to help him find his daughter. Meanwhile, the nonprofit Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disaster aims to help people find support during crises through social networks, like Facebook or Twitter. And the organization wants social-networking sites to become a first line of defense when humanitarian needs arise.
So it seems that emergency responders might need to deal with more social-networking usage going forward.
Are police officers and firefighters becoming an afterthought? Would you ping Facebook, Twitter, or your local emergency service first in a critical situation?
Microsoft Vine looks like an odd social experiment. It's designed to help users send notifications to the people they need to reach in emergencies. I tried the product and found it very un-Microsoft-like. It's useless as a single-user app, and it's also oddly specific in its functionality. From Microsoft, I expect broad platforms and wide-open productivity tools. Vine is neither.
Or is it? I took my questions to Microsoft, and was routed to a person whose title made it clear that there's more going on with Vine than the product initially reveals. I ended up talking with Tammy Savage, general manager of the Microsoft Public Safety Initiative.
Tammy Savage, general manager of the Microsoft Public Safety Initiative.
(Credit: Microsoft)At its core, Vine is based on a new Microsoft platform for routing communications between different systems. The platform is built to know the various ways there are to reach anyone using it, and it tries multiple methods until it gets its message through.
For example, some emergency messages might go to users' e-mail accounts or be sent as text messages. Some may go to regular telephones, and will get converted from text to speech if necessary. If one communication method goes down (if calls can't go through after a big disaster, for instance) the platform routes messages over another until they reach enough people to satisfy the requirements of the message.
Rules dictate to whom a message goes. An emergency message to check on a child when a parent is unable to after an earthquake, for example, might only require one person who gets the message to reply to it in the affirmative to satisfy the rule. A note about a kids' soccer game being canceled due to a muddy field would keep bouncing through the system until all the parents got it.
To keep the product in front of users, so they don't forget about when they need it, Vine also lets you track local news, and it can be used it to "check in" when you're traveling, even if you're not in the middle of an emergency. (See Meet Vine for more.)
... Read more
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.
- prev
- 1
- next
