Twitter 911
About a year ago, I published an article that claimed that with all innovations surrounding us, the technology is, in most cases, not reliable enough . The most recent example came from GMail’s outage two weeks ago. Anyway, in the article I mentioned the tragic incident where a VoIP 911 service sent an ambulance to the wrong place.
Up until now, no major breakthrough was made in VoIP 911 services. That is most evident in the FAQ pages of all major Mobile VoIP service provider. You’re guaranteed to see a clause indicating the service is not designated to work with 911 calls. Obviously, many regulatory and technological issues prevent VoIP 911 to become a reality. For instance, how (and who?) would WiFi routers update when a device connect to them?
Perhaps some partial answer to those issues can come from a totally different place. , which have had an incredible 752% growth in 2008, Facebook and other social-interfaces might provide it. Here’s the deal. You make a VoIP 911 call. The interface to PSAP will send your social-networks username. PSAP could gather your latest status and could know, for instance, that just before the call, the caller twitted about arriving to his hotel. I’m sure you could think of other examples.
With growing trend to tell the entire world what we’re doing and where, that information could help in emergencies.
March 14th, 2009 at 17:24
[...] Moreover, we already deliberately provide so much private information about ourselves in Facebook, Twitter, windows messenger status and others that privacy claims about big brother monitoring seems [...]
March 15th, 2009 at 15:27
[...] Moreover, we already deliberately provide so much private information about ourselves in Facebook, Twitter, windows messenger status and others that privacy claims about big brother monitoring seems [...]