So, when Portland's Office of Emergency Management uses twitter to notify people of severe weather alerts, or the public transit system tweets about system breakdowns, that's not serious or important? Just because you assert it doesn't mean Twitter can't be a useful broadcast medium.
Given Twitter's quality of service (which is admittedly getting better, but still pretty bad), I can't see how using it for anything but purely informational messages would be a good idea.
It frankly seems downright dangerous for people to start depending on their Twitter feeds for critical information, particularly if the organizations disseminating that information start relying on Twitter rather than maintaining their own more fault-tolerant infrastructures (like weather-alert radio or the Emergency Broadcast System). I hope and suspect that Portland OEM is smarter than that, but it seems like it could be dangerously tempting for a budget-constrained agency to try and outsource broadcasting to a totally inappropriate medium.
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So, when Portland's Office of Emergency Management uses twitter to notify people of severe weather alerts, or the public transit system tweets about system breakdowns, that's not serious or important? Just because you assert it doesn't mean Twitter can't be a useful broadcast medium.
So when Twitter is down people die in hurricanes? I don't think so, somehow.
Any reliance on that service for life-critical things is clearly delusion, incompetence, and downright frightening.
Reliance on _any_ single service for life-critical things is just as you say.
Given Twitter's quality of service (which is admittedly getting better, but still pretty bad), I can't see how using it for anything but purely informational messages would be a good idea.
It frankly seems downright dangerous for people to start depending on their Twitter feeds for critical information, particularly if the organizations disseminating that information start relying on Twitter rather than maintaining their own more fault-tolerant infrastructures (like weather-alert radio or the Emergency Broadcast System). I hope and suspect that Portland OEM is smarter than that, but it seems like it could be dangerously tempting for a budget-constrained agency to try and outsource broadcasting to a totally inappropriate medium.