Microblogging, Mobiles and Emergencies

Location matters. Many in the West use microblogging services and mobile social networks. In Africa, we see a mobile phone base that is waiting for a more robust social network connecting just those users. This is about even bigger ideas and the greater impact in Africa of a real social mobile network that can connect people using only mobile phones and do it as needed.

The main use of mobile social networks and microblogging is to update people’s status, and be updated by their friends and people they find interesting. That’s the main use, and it will remain so. The truth is, you and I don’t really care to hear what any random stranger is doing, even if they are nearby. However, we do care what is happening on a very hyper-local level in the case of emergency or “big event”.

It’s somewhat like the “pothole theory”: you wouldn’t normally care about the pothole on a street, unless it’s yours. It helps explain why we care about certain things.

If you use Twitter and have an iPhone, you might be aware of Twinkle - it’s an application that enriches your Twitter experience. In Twinkle, you can set your location and then a certain radius from which to receive twitter updates, even if they’re from perfect strangers. This is the beginning of where location, social networks and microblogging start to coalesce.

However, we don’t want to just get updates from random strangers in our locale. We want to only receive the ones that are “important to us". We want to be notified when there is an emergency, major traffic jam or something else pertinent to us individually.

What if we created a way that a greater federated system of microblogging applications and mobile social networks could also use location as an alert point?

The ability to anonymously send in reports to a system like Ushahidi running in any country, and those who are part of this greater, extended and federated network would be updated - even if that person was unknown and anonymous.