Platform analyzes tweets to provide data in the case of emergencies

Twitcident is helping first responders to better work out how to proceed by filtering Twitter updates about an incident by relevancy.

We’ve seen emergency services taking advantage of social media before, with the Seattle Police Department improving its engagement with the public by tweeting the calls it received. Now Twitcident is helping first responders to better work out how to proceed by filtering public user updates about an incident by relevancy. According to the developers, Twitter produces around 250 million tweets a day, and a particularly newsworthy incident at any time could instigate tens of thousands of updates. Using Twitcident, emergency service workers can use filters to find tweets that include photos, videos or geolocation tags, as well as information about risk or reported casualties in a particular region. While users can bring up individual tweets to analyze what is going on, Twitcident also enables them to create data visualizations about the number of tweets with relevant information over time. Although the service has been created with emergency service workers in mind, the platform could be equally useful for citizens who want to take the best action to ensure their safety in the case of local trouble. Twitcident takes the mass of public updates people make on social media sites everyday, making them useful as a source of real-time data for those trying to save lives. How else can social media content be leveraged for positive uses? Spotted by: Alexia M