Can a popular microblogging service like Twitter actually do more harm than good by causing panic through (mis)information in the general public at a time of crisis? This is one question that a blog post on the Foreign Policy -page raises now when a strain of swine influenza [wikipedia.org] has started spreading around the globe among humans and of course raises headlines in the media.
A funny counterpart to the article is this take on the subject from the nice’n’nerdy webcomic xkcd :
http://xkcd.com/574/
And one more swine flu related social media -bit: the use of Google Maps to create a realtime map following the outbreak is interesting [Update 12.5.09: map no longer running on regular Google Maps because of amount of data used], and depending on how big this thing get can be interesting to follow. Google even has a flu trends -service, at least for the U.S., but more of this in the original article – read that for an interesting blog piece on the subject.
As a side note I might mention that I quit Twitter after a week (see my previous and first post on the subject), I just didn’t feel comfortable with it at this point. Writing these blog posts is enough for me right now. I find the similar Yammer -service more useful since most of the other university e-learning people I work with are there – thus I have a ready community in Yammer ready for me that I didn’t have in Twitter.
References:
Swine flu: Twitter’s power to misinform
http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/25/swine_flu_twitters_power_to_misinform
Not comfortable with Twitter either. I do believe it does have function, but it’s not suitable for discussion. Without commenting it’s a very different beast from Yammer, Jaiku, etc.