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article: Nov 24 2009 - GeoNet is now on Twitter
As part of the GeoNet project’s aim to spread hazard information as widely as possible, we now automatically post the latest earthquake information, GeoNet News articles and volcanic alerts, to Twitter.
Twitter is a free to use “micro blogging” service available over the web via your computer and your mobile phone. It allows people, or in GeoNet’s case, systems, to post short messages, known as “tweets”, to a particular location on the web where millions of people around the world already “tweet” and “follow” the tweets of their friends, colleagues and anything else they’re interested in.
You can find out more about Twitter on Wikipedia and on the Twitter website itself:
Once you’ve taken some time to figure out the Twitter concept and the service for yourself, or you’re already a fully-fledged Twitter user, you might want to use your account to “follow” the “geonet” Twitter user and receive GeoNet updates in your Twitter stream.
What this means for our users of GeoNet information and website visitors is that there is now a parallel stream of information available to those interested in keeping bang up-to-date with the latest from GeoNet, without having to visit the website itself to find it. Further, if you’re a regular user of a mobile device like a cell phone or an iPhone, you can also have these updates sent to your phone as an SMS or view them via your phone’s built-in web-browser by visiting: http://m.twitter.com.
Both Vodafone and Telecom now have agreements with Twitter allowing users of both networks to receive tweets for free from Twitter users they’re following. Posting tweets will still incur the cost of a regular text message though.
Note that there are clauses specific to users of Telecom’s XT and existing CDMA networks. You can read more about the agreements on the respective websites:
- Telecom: http://www.telecom.co.nz/twitter
- Vodafone: http://tinyurl.com/twitter-on-vodafone
In order to send, receive and read Tweets via your mobile device, you will first need to set up a Twitter account, login and have enabled the relevant settings under the “mobile” tab.
Among the mobile settings there is a clever facility that allows you set the time of the day or night Tweets are sent to your mobile device. You will need to set up your time zone correctly for this to work.
You may also be following quite a few people, so in order to prevent being overloaded, you can manually enable/disable individual Twitter users from having their tweets sent to you. You can do this by visiting http://twitter.com or http://m.twitter.com from your mobile device.
