[Note: Follow me on Twitter.]

Recently, within a couple of hours, the following three bits of info reached me.

First, a friend of mine posted this on his blog:

I am socially networked to capacity. I have my blog comments go to my email, my Twitter feed updating my Facebook, all accessible on my current phone…I am like that famous evolution poster of a fish crawling out of a lake, then on four legs, then stooped on two, then walking upright, with an additional image of a man whose posture is slumping back toward the simian, peering into his phone. I might have a problem.

If so, he’s not alone.

A couple of hours later, I read that a 2008 study predicts that there will be nearly two billion mobile Internet users by 2013 — a number that will rival the total number of PC Internet users. And in certain parts of the world, mobile Internet users will far outnumber conventional PC Internet users.

That same day, I read the section of FEMA’s newly published National Disaster Housing Strategy that talks about “Future Directions” (pg. 42). It contains seven initiatives and — without going into great and bloody detail — initiative #3 (pg. 44-46) goes like this:

Deliver consistent, accurate, accessible, and timely shelter information during disasters…Plans should take advantage of current technology, such as text messaging…

So there it is: the future is in mobile text messaging, which is fine. But Twitter takes it a step further by being universal and it’s free.

So it occurs to me that disaster management professionals should be thinking about integrating some sort of micro-blogging technology  into our planning protocols.

[Note: Yes, I’m aware that Nielsen reported that more than 60 percent of Twitter users abandon it after a single month. But that’s a reflection of how fickle Ashton Kutcher’s fan base is, not a reflection of Twitter’s inherent utility. If, for example, Amazon should buy Twitter and use it for a payment platform to rival PayPal, watch how quickly Twitter’s retention rate skyrockets.]

I’ve had experience in writing Hurricane Planning documentation for the Gulf Coast. Part of our planning involves mass care shelters for southern Louisiana residents fleeing an oncoming hurricane. There is always a network of public shelters that are made available via public transport. It takes a lot of coordination to and communication to get people from their neighborhoods into those shelters. Twitter could help in that communications effort.

For example, officials at a “parish pickup point” should be able to “tweet” about conditions on the ground, simultaneously reaching bus drivers and shelter officials who follow their texts. This provides several other benefits as well:

• Because mobile phone networks are somewhat more robust than regional Internet access points, you have a better emergency communications network.
• Plus all tweets are logged automatically and can be transcribed easily at a later date.
• Twitter’s search capabilities can help emergency managers stay on top of breaking conditions.
• The use of hashtags can filter incoming information easily.
• Search and hashtagging can also help with after-action reports.

And so forth and so on.

UPDATE: There was a fourth bit of information that came to me after I wrote this post — Craig Fugate, Pres. Obama’s choice to head FEMA, has a Twitter account.