Thursday, July 31, 2008

Too much information ...

From the too-much-information file, in the aftermath of Tuesday's Los Angeles-area earthquake:



Twitter tweet here. From this CNET story, we learn that MissRFTC is one Verdell Wilson, who I guess can now lay claim to having worn the, uh, stirrups of Internet fame.

:)

On a more serious note, during emergencies the SMS / text-messaging network may be the only way to get a message to others letting them know your status and whereabouts, as the voice network often gets overwhelmed with 9-1-1 calls and the like. Indeed, you may wish to stay off the voice network (unless you need emergency assistance, of course) so that others can get through to the emergency services.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yes and no. SMS messages can be severely delayed, especially if...

(wait for it)

everybody is texting =)

It's one reason why broadcasting SMS alerts on college/university campuses for critical information such as an active shooter alert is almost always a miserable failure with the pages not reaching recipients for 15 minutes to 24 hours. These systems pump out thousands of messages through only a handful of towers in the immediate area and thus overwhelm the system just as badly as voice does.

It's probably not as bad as a disaster response, unless of course you are near a campus and their alert system is adding fuel to the fire :)