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The Minneapolis bridge collapse, the Virginia Tech shooting, California wildfires, the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, even here in Fargo during recent flooding—what do these all have in common?

They were helped in some small way by people using Twitter.

Twitter is too often the way we hear about what our co-workers had for lunch, or what song they’re listening to (guilty myself of this one), or a source of endless business propositions. But in time of real emergency, the 140-character microblogging site has proven itself as a tool for getting out important information, mobilizing people to get them where they can help most, letting them know about road closures, and linking people in need to important resources that can provide relief.

Twitter has some advantages over television and radio communication. It’s not affected by the common power outages that accompany emergencies, it’s not well-censored by oppressive governments, and almost everyone is carrying with them the means to use it.

But how effective is it, really? Twitter is still prone to outages of its own—that are not even related to emergencies. There is also the issue that the sheer volume of messages being sent clouds its ability to provide needed information.

In recent years Twitter’s popularity has soared right along with the increased use of Smartphones. This has increased its reach, but Twitter has limited its Application Programming Interface (API) so that you can now update only once per minute. While this is likely still enough to send out messages to the public, it does mean Twitter could not be used for effective internal communications or interaction between fire and police departments.

Almost a year ago, I blogged about Twitter replacing/enhancing the nation’s Emergency Broadcast System, and still wonder what support there would be for Twitter becoming a publicly-funded service, like “911”?

Twitter could be much more than just another social network, but could it be an effective emergency network?  Here in Fargo, we’re readying to test its effectiveness once again.