Emergency responders start benefiting from Twitter when natural disasters strike like typhoons and tornadoes. Recognizing the increasing number of victims that tweet their plight during major natural disasters, an initiative called Micromappers has enlisted digital humanitarian volunteers to sift through those tweets and help emergency services locate those in greater need.
This method has already been applied to direct UN aid workers during the rescue missions in the Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan.
This is event is available for participation on an ongoing basis
English
This conference aims to bring together researchers and practitioners in Emergency Response and Humanitarian Disasters who are interested in Social Media and/or Semantic Technologies. We seek both academic studies as well as practical applications and use cases across both areas of interest.
When a series of storms and twisters hit at least 10 states in the USA at the end of February, many victims used social media channels to report their status or those of neighbors and friends. That way they could indicate their exact location to family or search parties by just a single tweet or a facebook post. The app "Foursquare" for example allows users to "check in" to specific locations. Twitter's twittermap works similarly showing users' location on Google Maps. Facebook's Places page allow geotagging on Bing Maps.
The social networking website Twitter on Friday announced it has partnered with two satellite providers to make its messaging service available on satellite phones for the first time. A post on the company's blog said Twitter has partnered with the two largest satellite operators, Iridium and Thuraya, to allow their subscribers to access Twitter SMS.
Facebook is increasingly used to crowdsource crisis information and response, as is Twitter. So is it just a matter of time until we see similar use cases with Google+? Another question I have is whether such uses cases will simply reflect more of the same or whether we’ll see new, unexpected applications and dynamics? Of course, it may be premature to entertain the role that Google+ might play in disaster response just days after it’s private beta launch, but the company seems fully committed to making this new venture succeed.
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