ScanDiego.com

What does everybody think about using twitter for announcing breaking events? If you're not familiar with it, its self-proclaimed as a "micro-blogging" and "social-networking" site. You can create your own account, update your "status" (what you're doing or whats on your mind), and follow other people you find interesting. I think this could be useful for the site if anyone interested creates a twitter account and follows a master account that several of us can share the login to. For example, on twitter my username is "peterstuart". I also created an account called "scandiego". For example, I hear a pursuit start for Mid-city. I login to the Scandiego account and "tweet" the pursuit, everybody that has twitter accounts and is following the Scandiego account will receive the update. The useful part of this is that you can setup twitter to receive "tweets" on your mobile phone. So you set it up to forward Scandiego tweets to your phone, and anytime someone tweets an incident on Scandiego, you'll get the text message directly to your phone. What do you guys think about this? Useful? Interested?

http://grouptweet.com/

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Grouptweet looks like exactly what we could use. As long as theres interest in the idea, although it wouldn't harm anybody to go ahead and start using it, just no point in doing it of theres no followers.

Alright, I added the group, now just need to be followed back according to GT. It would be better if the username was drop cap, i.e. 'scandiego' as opposed to 'Scandiego'. No shifting on the cellphone if it's all one case. Twitter is case-sensitive and rejected my search for 'scandiego'.

Change username here: https://twitter.com/account/settings

KISS

Twitter isn't case sensitive. http://www.twitter.com/scandiego or Scandiego all follows through to the same account. The search on twitter just really sucks, you can search with or without cap S and it doesn't come up. Just point everyone to twitter.com/scandiego when you send a direct message (d scandiego message here) it is also not case-sensitive.

Grouptweet gets the job done, however there seems to be a 7-15 minute delay on the re-tweet. I'm sure there is another utility out there... I'm just thinking you could miss a lot of hot information/traffic in that much time. There may just be a large server load during the middle of the day.

Looks like 5 minutes for my DM from phone to website. I'll update when it bounces back to the phone.

@N6ATF, your tweet made it to my mobile phone at 1329, 9 minutes after your send time. There's probably a delay in the direct message going to scandiego, then grouptweet recognizing it and retweeting it, another delay for it to be pushed through and actually tweeted, then even more delay for it to arrive on my mobile phone. Twitter has been known for not handling loads very well, and some messages not being delivered...


Tweet tweet?

Yeah. Duh, I hadn't turned device updates on.

Well it seems like a plain old e-mail to a group of SMS addresses is still the fastest distribution method. Since it's really only limited by the processing speed of the cellphone companies' servers.

Fill me in on your methods? I currently subscribe to Scannerbuff and have that forwarded to my mobile, which I occasionally get information from. Do you have any other sources?

I was describing one of the stringer page methods, as I understand from hearing them talk on the air.

Another, which I did have access to for a while, was IPN. Not sure what their system chain was exactly, but I left because of egregiously bad pages from the same people repeatedly and getting criticized for making honest mistakes in my own dispatches.

Don't have any sources now, that's why I hope Twitter can be better. San Diego emergency pages by San Diegans, for free.