bonus- Facebook v Twitter

This inspired blog post is about facebook and its uses. Today, many controversies have arisen about twitter in numerous aspects including emergency response and social media of course. My focus today is going to be the use of facebook in disaster response and the question of whether or not we as responders to crisis should in fact use facebook. In my opinion, I believe that we should use facebook. However, I do not believe that we should use it before we use twitter, Peoplefinder or even shelterfinder. This is because all of those sites I believe are more reliable than facebook is. Peoplefinder and Shelterfinder are more concentrated on one task and hand, were facebook covers more of a wider spectrum. For example, if you were looking for a family member, were would you look first. Facebook? No, you would go to a site that souly does that, which is Peoplefinder, and the likewise for Shelterfinder.  So, with that being said, I believe that facebook should just be another tool that responders use for extra information that is not necessarily needed in a time crunch because twitter would be a lot easier for that. Although facebook is a great tool that millions of people use, it cannot be confirmed. In other words, any random person can post anything they want whether it’s true or not. Sure, this is also true for twitter, but that is also a issue with twitter. Furthermore, twitter is so much easier to use for groups. All someone has to do is put a hash tag and it shows up. Where with facebook, one usually has to be invited into a group and common sentences or words don’t all show up in one place. For example, if I posted on my twitter, “my neighbor is trapped under debris on 54 north bridge street #Help.” Everyone who said help in their post would all come up on a certain page, and it would be easy for responders to classify them and get them the help they need.  And if someone posted that exact same sentence as their status on facebook, onlookers might see that and call for help, but it would not get directed to a certain page. So in other words, twitter is much for efficient for its use in emergency response. Another reason why twitter is so great in emergency response is because it is actually starting to be adopted by agencies all over the world. Sure it has some flaws, such as the fact that it often needs to be translated, and it takes a lot of man-power and man-hours to translate those tweets, but it is on its way up and will soon be proficient. I believe that facebook, although ahead on social media, but falls short of twitter in the emergency response field. Im not sure if there is something that facebook could change in order for it to be better in emergency response, but if there is I would be very interested in seeing what it is and how it works. Maybe one day in the future we will be able to see such things.