Virginia Tech student paper: wishing more universities used Twitter

Systems that would help a university to alert most of its student body at the time of an 'event' are something that the student-run Virginia Tech Planet Backsburg has just posted about on its own Twitter site.

"Wishing more universities would use Twitter to notify students of important events"
"Including Virginia Tech..."

On issues like this, one sees social media tools in a different light. The ability to send one message to an entire college campus across email, SMS and web feed in one go has its obvious benefits.

Here is the Planet Blacksburg site: http://www.planetblacksburg.com
And here is the Twitter site run by the student journalists: http://twitter.com/blacksburg

Comments

[Jonny Bentwood]

Technology has been used for good and bad following the recent tragedy. Most notably phenomena of the eBAy Vultures who put up site names for sale such as virginiatechshootings.com. One seller hope to get $1million for www.vatechmassacure.com by promising to give 98% to the victims families if they buy it now.

I applaud technology being able to give people a voice to share their grief and worries where otherwise they might be left alone. Having a mrs that is a psychologist I hear too many anecdotal stories of people losing the plot because they do not have an easy forum to talk. If the flip side of this is macabre capitalism then so be it – personally I think it’s a worthwhile trade-off.

My post backs this up.

[Lem Bingley]

Research suggests that sending bulk text messages in a time of emergency is the very last thing you'd want to do, bearing in mind it will likely block anyone trying to make a 999/911 call on their cellphone at about the same time.

[Drew]

Good point Lem.

I'd like to know what split Twitter has for its updates to followers. My guess is 60 per cent SMS, 30 per cent web or RSS and 10 per cent IM.

[LeOgAhEr]

I Love you girls

Buy