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Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service in which users can send, receive, and read short posts that can provide just in time information for crisis management. Twitter, broadly launched in October 2006, is a platform independent, lightweight subscriber information source. It allows people to post messages or micro-blogs up to 140 characters making it an effective communication tool for mobile devices and adaptive to emergent situations. People can subscribe to be “followers” of an individual or of a topic (e.g., disaster) allowing people to quickly share relevant information with their family, friends, and others.Twitter supports emergent collaboration among many users and could potentially support command and control in joint disaster response operations in several ways. Twitter crosses platforms as it can be accessed via the web or cell phone making it effective for information sharing in joint operations.Therefore, as in radio broadcasts, many people can benefit from the Twitter posts of one person providing an effective lightweight mechanism for disseminating information. However, unlike a radio broadcast, Twitter does not rely on a single user or single location making it more resilient to power outages.People are highly adaptive when it comes to using information technologies. Many collaborative tools have short lifecycles. Consequently, the design and use of such systems naturally evolves. We learn a lot about the emergent properties of collaboration by studying communication on these systems. For these tools to be effectively used and adopted, the context, the social structures, and the collaborative situation need to be evaluated together. We were able to do that because of the virtual nature of Twitter and our results provide a couple collaboration patterns that should be useful for early evaluation of other lightweight collaborative technologies.
article by : Beth Veinott et al.
summarized by : Muhamad Farid Bin Latib MC22s5a
obtained from : scholar.google.com
