Wednesday Twitter: Tennis Balk, Emergency Use, Surgery Window

Roddick Tweets Back

From the NYT:

It did not take long for Andy Roddick to respond to rules posted by the Tennis Integrity Unit regarding players’ use of Twitter during the United States Open. His vehicle? Twitter, of course.

“I think its lame the U.S. Open is trying to regulate our tweeting,” he wrote Friday night. “I understand the on-court issue but not sure they can tell us if we can’t do it on our own time … we’ll see.”

Another sports figure being Tweet-blocked by the governing body of the sport. It's only a matter of time before every sport has some written policy about Twitter and social media. He goes on to state that you'd "have to be a moron to send ‘inside info’ through a tweet." But that's the problem and reason in and of itself: rules and guidelines like that are in place to rope in the lowest common brainpan.

But I can also understand where Roddick is coming from. Especially in tennis, every player is a free agent and you're as valuable as two things: your record and your PR campaign. For anyone with an agent worth their salt, they recognize that Twitter is a part of the popularity package and limiting it could literally hit in the wallet.


Tweet in Case of Emergency

The Safe America Foundation:

a national safety group working with the U.S. government, announced yesterday that text messaging, social networking sites, and Twitter could help families stay in touch in the wake of a disaster. Although Twitter hasn't always been known for its stability, in emergency situations when phone lines and other traditional communication avenues are down, social networking sites like it and others could turn into reliable backup methods for reaching loved ones.

While I wouldn't necessarily rely on Twitter alone, it is an interesting idea to - extrapolated - keep in touch during a disaster by using various social media. GMail went down earlier this week. Where was the confirmation? Twitter.

Unfortunately, all of my forms of communication rely on 3 things: landline, cell signal, and electricity. Electricity going out (and it seems the most fragile) knocks out the router, therefore any access to the internet. Cell signal and data package would still allow for internet access and phone calls, but with no internet at home, most of those channels would be packed, leaving the most reliable communication to the tiny SMS packets that can pop through much more easily. If that goes down? I may be one of the only people in my family that has both a corded phone (no electric dependency) and an active land line, but I'd be calling people without corded phones or through the clogged cell network.

Good advice to expand resources, but how realistic is it, really?


A Window Into the Surgical Process

This was a heartfelt story of one of the hundreds/thousands of ways Twitter can be used, from the AP:

[Monna Cleary] underwent a hysterectomy and uterine prolapse surgery, had given her OK for hospital spokeswoman Sarah Corizzo to post a play-by-play of the operation on Twitter, a social-networking site that lets users send out snippets of information up to 140 characters long using cell phones or computers.

Corizzo sent more than 300 tweets over more than three hours from a computer just outside the operating room's sterile field. Nearly 700 people followed them. Eight tweeted questions to Corizzo about the procedure and a Cleary family member commented on how fascinating it was to follow the surgery.

When the haters sneer at you and say "Yeah, but what's it good for?" you can link them to this article.