The recent incident of Boston and the support technology gave to the police, investigators and the near ones of the victims, how all these were possible by that humble Blackberry introduction of push mail in Smartphone infancy.
This is not about the victims but about the results that social media created for the runners and victims of this heinous incident. It is sometime since the incident and social media has been the most significant support to all those who wanted to support and contribute. We will come to them categorically and before that here is wishing all speedy recovery and end of search for missing relatives. Tech news is about the help technology could extend to the victims and to the law enforcers.
First in leading the pack is twitter. This social medium has always provided us with advance or immediate news of significance. Here also the news broke out immediately and when the call lines collapsed they were the first to spread news of hope. About reporting the survival percentage, about informing us the hospitals in action, casualties and situation on ground zero, all have been reported with immediate effect, sometimes even in real time. All these have been done either by twitter itself or any of those netizens willing to help. We will come back to twitter again but then there were others also.
Most of the dedicated photo sharing platforms could give us the exact magnitude of the situation. This was important for mobilizing resources. Till the magnitude is not understood everyone will be in doubt and this also created a sympathy wave for many people to start contributing in their possible ways. This was necessary to get faster support from all corners and get the necessities like first aid done in no time.
Facebook is another one to give enormous support. The forum allowed all to check on their friends and relatives. The new introduction of graph search was significant in this like #boston in twitter. Through this any user could find their searches confined in a location like Boston. A message to them was replied and provided some comfort. The first anxiety of life is satisfied. Further ones can be satisfied later. Remember graph search was introduced for business purposes. So combined twitter and facebook did all the tricks among themselves if we chose to neglect another humble service.
Mobile calls are easy now and they were the primary mode of communication to enquire wellbeing. As the calls mounted and networks got jammed people had to find alternate means to get that precious voice heard and assured. This though is not all. BBM is another means which limited itself in a small group but nevertheless served the important purpose. It sent the communication.
You can tie up all these as just mobile technology; we were discussing technology as a complete means. Well today when it is easy to integrate internet into mobile we can say that. Remember that company I just mentioned which pioneered net connections with their mobile email services? They are clawing back to that throne they assumed they owned long ago and today when we are at peace knowing the good news it would be hard to acknowledge Blackberry’s contribution in pioneering and revolutionizing internet in handheld devices. Take a bow Quebec guys.
