Category Twitter

I’ve had this in my inbox… for a presentation on a whole series of “Twitter Saves Lives” type scenarios.   For those who remember the tragic events of 9/11, we all know, if we had Twitter in those days, communication would have spread like wild-fire and countless lives would have been saved when Cell networks went down, but SMS stayed up.

This has been said for lives being saved and communication on Twitter during EarthQuakes and other situations, but here is a direct story of how lives were saved recently with Lost Skiers’.

Twitter, Google Maps Used To Track Down Two Missing Skiers – from TechCrunch

by Robin Wauters on March 3, 2009

Update: Tragically, one of the skiers, Rob Williams, was not able to be saved. Our thoughts go out to his family.

Yesterday, a group of technology entrepreneurs from the UK on a skiing vacation in the Swiss Alps (Verbier) lost two of their party around 4 PM CET. Other members of the group put out arequest on Twitter in order to learn the numbers of their mobile phones, so they could use the signals to track them down.

According to follow-up tweets, one person (Jason) was rescued using a combination of GPS, Google Maps to determine longitude and latitude, and the signals returned from his iPhone, but another one (Rob) was still missing as the two had apparently been split up. It’s been 7 to 10 hours since the last Twitter messages at this point, so unfortunately we can only hope and not confirm if Rob has been found by now.

Below are a number of screenshots with Twitter messages from some of the group, includingAlex Hoye (CEO of digital marketing agency Latitude, Michael Acton Smith from Mind Candy,Joshua Marsh and Hermione Way (TechFluff.tv) Michelle Dewbs (winner of The Apprentice).

Let’s hope everything is alright. We’re frantically tracking Twitter to learn more, and we’re not the only ones.

(Hat tip to Google Maps Mania)

Hats off to those who took advantage of the medium, and TechCrunch for covering it.  And it just goes to show, Twitter is a community of people who want to share information, but also share in the lives of others, often including saving lives whether it is something as direct as freezing cold or even losing ones job and needing to find a new way.

This isn’t the first time Twitter has helped save someone’s life, and it won’t be the last.

Wow, Seattle is a long walk from Chicago, so I wasn’t able to attend!

But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t be involved!

However in hind-sight I do want to be able to catch up on the resources, and I know others will, so here is a listing of some resources which were available and accessible for the CloudCamp Seattle event!

For those of you who are on Twitter, there was definitely some activity out there on the Tweetosphere!  Lots of activity on the hashtag #cloudcamp which was actively hit up by these folks as well. – @DanielleMORRILL @SecureSun @krishnan @mediaphyter @bmw

Special thanks to @DanielleMORRILL and @bmw for the live feed and moderation as well :)

The links! The links!  Some must visit links are…

Video Feed from the back of the room (This has direct links to the video :))

A similar feed on that was found here

Danielle Morrill’s live feed during Cloud Camps

Special thanks to  :)

And ofcourse, :)

You ever wake up to look at your tweet and come across this type of completely insincere DM?

This would be great if my name were infact John, but it isn’t.  And this is sheer spam!

Well, @jesse has taken SocialToo to a new level by taking responsibility to not promote the sending of DM Spam.  As Twitter grows at the exponential rates it is, vehicles to manage this relationship between real sincere users and fake autobots had to be taken somewhere.   I’m glad to see Jesse step up on this issue.   @louisgray has great coverage of this as well, as an advisor to the Socialtoo team and other boards, his knowledge and skill really provides context for these type of situations.

One of the greatest pieces of this, is as Jesse puts it:

In addition, starting today, while you will no longer have need for blocking SocialToo users’ automated DMs, we encourage you to invite all your friends to come check the same option you were using to block SocialToo DMs, and we’ll block other sites that do automated-dms. If you provide your Twitter username and password (this is required because other services require it – it will be via OAuth in the near future) and check the box, “Turn off automatic Direct Messages from other services?“, we’ll set you up to block DMs from as many services that do this as we can, automatically.

So, if you don’t like to get Auto-DM Spam, whether it WAS from Socialtoo, or from other third party services – subscribing to SocialToo, a responsible social service is the way to go.

I wish you all the best on this, and John you can remove your own Bubble of Spam like this ;)

Every now and then the discussion comes up “Where do I find ‘x’ people on twitter?”  I usually resort to random google searches, sometimes finding what I’m looking for, sometimes not quite so much!  So here is my repository for you, me and my cat to find people easier.

NetApp Folks are Twittering!

Storage Folks Are Twittering

Virtual Twits including a script which will auto-add them for you!

PowerShell Twitterers, including a script which will auto-add them for you!

C Level Tweeters

December: Newspapers that use Twitter (Thousands of accts on Twitter!)

60 New York Times profiles on Twitter

UK journalists on Twitter

USGovernment on Twitter

Hunger Twitterers

And that’s all I have for a repository right now – if you have a list which should be added here, or you think I should include some specific grouping, make it known :)

So, here is a breakdown of the NetApp folks on Twitter!

	Name + Blog	Twitter ID!
	Christopher Kusek	@cxi
	Michael Moeschler	@moesch
	Eric Pederson	@onStorage
	Kostadis Roussos	@kostadis_netapp
	Jeff Bearer	@jeffbearer
	Val Bercovici	@valb00
	NetApp	@NetApp
	NetAppUK	@NetAppUK
	Jeremy Merrill	@JeremyMerrill
	David A. Chapa	@davidchapa
	Samantha Moulton	@SamMoulton
	Mike Riley	@MSR11
	Kaitlyn Dierkes	@kdierkes

And a specific mention for the NetApp+Virtualization folks! ;)

	Name + Blog	Twitter ID!
	Chris Gebhardt	@chrisgeb
	Abhinav Joshi	@Abhinav_Joshi
	Brian Gracely	@bgracely
	Jack Mcleod	@VirtuallyNetApp
	Keith Aasen	@keith_aasen
	Vaughn Stewart	@Vaughn_Stewart

If you feel you should be added to this list, let me know and I’ll be sure to add you accordingly!