Twitter Disaster Alerts: a useful tool for public warning?

Last week, Twitter announced a new service for governments: Twitter Disaster Alerts, http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/25/new-twitter-disaster-alerts-twitter-launches-emergency-alerts-for-public-warnings/
Our latest blog analyzes this latest addition to the set of public alerting tools.

Twitter disaster alerts: a logical extension to Twitter
Twitter Disaster Alerts are a logical next step or Twitter. Twitter is already widely used as an informal tool for public alerting by the general publis and even some governments. Therefore this is a logical addition to Twitter's services.

The list of participating US governmental institutions is already impressive and we believe there are many situations where Twitter Disaster Alerts can be highly effective due to the high level of acceptance of Twitter among the population.

Functionality missing in Twitter Disaster Alerts
Twitter Disaster Alerts can be highly effective. On the other hand, it is not the ultimate tool. It has two main disadvantages:
1) Twitter currently has no geo-specific filtering capacity i.e. alert messages will be received by all subscribers and not only by subscribers that are in an affected area.
2) Twitter uses the public internet which may be congested during crises and disasters. Please also see our previous blog on this subject. This means that the service cannot be used during critical circumstances where an alerting service is highly needed.

A potentially effective new tool in the toolbox, but not the ultimate tool
Our idea on Twitter Disaster Alerts is that it is a tool that can be highly effective in many circumstances. But please be aware that Twitter uses the public internet as a communication channel and this channel might be congested during critical circumstances. This implies that in many cases (i.e. 9/11, Katrina), Twitter Disaster Alerts would not not have been functional under these circustances.