We need to make the social norms clear: Twitter is where you talk about the consistency of your oatmeal. E-mail is for when you are running late for a meeting.
-Saul Hansen, What Annoys Me About Twitter – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com.
Tweets are the blog posts you thought about writing, but didn’t feel they had enough substance
-Mark Cuban, Some Twitter Thoughts
Now at first, I have to confess, this struck me as kind of odd. Your spouse calls you to tell you about an earthquake at your house, a potentially catastrophic natural event, and the first thing you say is, “Was it on Twitter?”
Stories about how civil authorities are exploring Twitter use in emergency situations amuse me. It doesn’t seem robust or pervasive enough for true emergency communication. If the Personal Democracy Forum can bring it to its knees, a major hurricane or earthquake would snuff it out instantly. Andrew Sayer has imagined a Twitter timeline during a zombie attack, which I don’t believe is a scenario thought out so far by the pros.