It’s been around 14 months since the Indians heard about any bomb blast news. But the silence was broken yesterday by a bomb blast at a German bakery shop in Pune. 9 people died and several others were injured because of the unfortunate incident. My hearty condolence and prayers to the affected people. The terror has proved once again that it has no courage. It’s a hard time for the Government officials and as people of India, we should support the officials to stand against the terror.
On hearing the news, a thought was bubbled up. Why can’t we use some kinda alert system, which is built on Twitter, to gather/track/report intels of suspected incidents. Twitter was well proved to be a reporting mechanism during the Mumbai terror attack time. But at that time, tweeple were reporting the incident after it had happened. If we could build some twitter alert system, which gathers information about suspected activities in sensitive areas and predict what’s going to happen, then this could save hundreds of lives.
A Twitter terror alert system?
Here’s the concept of my idea.
- A Twitter based information gathering system which is capable of receiving tweets and analyze them for suspected events. More preference should be given to the tweets which are coming from sensitive areas (like, Mumbai and other metros). This is possible since Geolocation is not hard these days (HTML5 supports and all mobile devices are capable for Geolocation).
- Common people, i.e. We, send tweets to the system when ever we see suspected activities in our area. This is not hard for the tweeple as we used to do it everyday.
- The system should analyze the tweets and alert the Government officials if anything seems to go wrong.
- To overcome the wrong/false messages sent to the system intentionally, the system should award points to each tweeter based on the correctness. If a tweeter has more correctness points, then obviously his/her tweet should be given more importance. In the same way, a tweeter is sending too many false messages, he/she could be blocked by the system.
- If the Government is thinking that sharing these sensitive information in a public site like Twitter, then It can strike a deal with Twitter to setup a private twitter system exclusively for this alert usage itself in a secured server. People are allowed to send the information but the information will not be shared in the public (no public timeline). This saves the tweeter’s identity and it’s a good business model for Twitter itself.
Its just an idea. I know it’s not hard to implement because there are already several alert systems (Tsunami, Earthquake) in place. Its just take some time and effort from the interested people to implement the above system. And I’m sure if executed properly, the system will definitely be able to tackle the terror.
Off course it needs lots of brainstorming and discussion before the idea takes some proper shape. You are welcome to share your opinion.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
By the time our bureaucrats actually implement it, many more bombs would have blasted!
hm. that’s the bitter truth.