Aka, Tweet™ 1-800-Disaster. Even though the danger from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan is far from over, I was watching the Red Cross run its text > donation campaign again, the way they had done to great success during the Haitian earthquake and thought, what if we had Twitter a year before Hurricane Katrina hit. Would we have found out about food shortages sooner? People stuck on top of their houses? Lost animals found? Overall relief efforts coordinated better? Who knows.
When it comes to a post-Twitter American natural disaster world, we haven’t really had a major event blow up for us on Twitter where we used it to coordinate rescue efforts on a massive scale. Sorry, but trying to find the best parties at SXSW doesn’t count. So far, the service has been covering elections, Big TV events (VMAs, Oscars and Super Bowl), and Hudson River runways.
Of course there was BP, but that was man-made. About the only thing Twitter did there was let Anderson Cooper gripe about how mainstream media wasn’t being let on the beaches to cover the story. Easy Coop, your American Haiti earthquake moment is coming, because they always do.
Just keep watching Twitter.
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