 "Twitter introduces Alerts programme for emergency messages")
Social networking websites have proved their worth with help during disaster situations and Twitter has been at the helm of this effort. Natural disasters like floods, earthquakes and even situations like riots and uprisings, Twitter has managed to help disperse information at a break-neck speed, saving a lot of lives in the process. The micro-blogging service is going one step further today by introducing a new programme called Twitter alerts which will let agencies broadcast messages in crisis situations.
The introduction of this new feature by Twitter builds upon efforts by the service called “Lifeline” that was available for Japanese users to help them find emergency accounts in crisis situations. Twitter started to flesh out this feature better to help people around the world with such a crisis management system.
Alerts will be sent via SMS and push notifications
In a blog post announcing this service, Gaby Peña, Product Manager at Twitter wrote that this feature would get the website one step closer to helping users get important and accurate information from credible organisations during emergencies, natural disasters or moments when other communications services aren’t accessible.
Twitter Alerts will work in a simple way – if you sign up to receive an account’s Twitter Alerts, you will receive a notification directly to your phone whenever that account marks a Tweet as an alert. Notifications will be delivered via SMS and as push notifications if you use Twitter for iPhone and Android. These alerts will appear differently from other tweets on your timeline and will be marked with an orange coloured bell.
The list of organisations signing up are ever growing
Organisations that are part of the alerts programme will have a separate page where you can directly sign up for alerts. For example, FEMA’s page will be available at twitter.com/FEMA/alerts. You can check out the list of organisations that are a part of this growing alerts programme here.
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