Twitter Joins in on Search for Missing Girl
by Steven Rossi on October 20, 2008 in In the News, On the Web, Technology
Note: For some reason, Bing searches for “Halloween Masks” are coming here. Instead, see this post: Halloween Mask Sales Reflect National Election Polls.
Twitter was abuzz a few days ago as a 14-year-old girl from South Carolina went missing. Oftentimes in the past Twitter has been used during a time of tragedy for communication about the situation, but this time things were different. Twitterers rapidly went to work getting the world out by “re-tweeting” the situation by saying something like:
“RT Twitter AMBER ALERT @genochurch’s 14 yr old daughter is missing http://tinyurl.com/5yodvb – PLEASE RETWEET”
The words in this tweet quickly began to trend as (by my calculations) about 1200 people forwarded the message to all of their followers.
I’m not exactly sure how Kenzie, the girl, was found, and I’m not really sure Twitter was directly involved, but literally thousands of people were aware of the situation. Obviously in a situation like this, the more who are able to be alert the better. Of course something like this is awful, but I’m fascinated by the practicality of Twitter and similar services in a time of personal need.
by Eugene
On October 23, 2008 at 6:43 am
I am searching for some ideas to write in my blog… somehow come to your blog. nice post. Eugene