While I fully admit that I am slow to warm up to Twitter, I will acknowledge that it has many important uses in the fields of law enforcement and emergency management. Take this article from www.kgw.com for instance:
Police use Twitter to Find Man with Dementia
by Teresa Blackman
kgw.com
Posted on May 10, 2010 at 10:22 AM
Updated yesterday at 10:29 AM
PORTLAND – Twitter messages helped detectives find an elderly man with dementia who had been missing since last weekend.
Richard Lewis, who uses a walker, somehow wandered away from his caregivers on Saturday. Then, police were able to track him to the area of N Lombard Avenue and N New York Street before their clues ran dry.
Detectives used the Portland Police Bureau’s Twitter account to ask for help finding the 80-year-old man. And they said it was a tweet that eventually brought him home.
“It was a tip from a Twitter user which ultimately allowed detectives to locate Mr. Lewis,” said PPB detective Mary Wheat.
In all types of investigations, police continue to increase their use of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook as tools to help crack their cases and hunt out criminals.
Something tells me that I should stop fighting the social media monster and just embrace it as both an important tool for emergency information and a not-so-important tool for users to show their poor grammar and syntax to the world.
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