TRIVIAL or SERIOUS . . .

it's FASTER than a SPEEDING BULLET –

After a couple of weeks on Twitter just tweeting fluff, like, "having coffee and feeding the cats" and posting cat pics or the awesome fog the other morning, I began to think that this could be an incredibly useful way to get real time information to people during the upcoming Hurricane Season. Being the weather nut that I am, The Weather Channel is pretty much on my TV most of the time, but I decided that I needed and wanted additional information - I needed weather tweets because, as the world goes today, I needed information "right now"! I surmised that this would be especially great if I could find Mississippi tweeters who were into weather and reporting those live events and posting pictures of any tornados or hurricanes, and of course damage.

So, I began digging around for storm chasers and various weather geeks who lived in Mississippi. I was especially interested in finding tweeters who lived along the Gulf Coast. It didn't take long to find some either but I also included following Mississippi Emergency Management - MSMEA.

Last night, I was watching live streaming video of a chase over in southeast Louisiana. The system they were chasing was huge and also moving over southwest Mississippi with warnings popping up every few minutes. Info from other weather tweeters was coming in every few minutes. The real time information coming in last night was really showing that Twitter could be extremely useful during dangerous weather events. Even though I was not directly in the line of bad weather last night, I was able to keep up with the events which included the coast. With a tweet from MSMEA, I was able to pass along information via email to coastal friends (as they don't tweet... yet) which they then passed on to others.

This morning I was able to read damage reports from Biloxi/Harrison Co. and look at a picture of flooding on Hwy. 90 in Ocean Springs which was tweeted by a person living there. Although I have a great "Katrina friend" living in Ocean Springs, she was going to go out driving and take pictures of any flooding and email them to me. I'm still waiting. . .

So you see the combination of and directness of an iPhone, or other camera phone, Twitter, and Twitpic are just "the bomb" for moving "the stuff of knowing what's going on" immediately along the information highway . . . which seems to get shorter and shorter everyday. The tweeting of weather info from professionals and people out on the chase along with the ability to tweet your own weather info and pictures of damage makes Twitter just twitterific!

Non-Tweeters, you need to hop into the Tweet Lane.

An example of some of the many serious tweets that went on all evening and night and into the morning today.

One of my many trivial tweets - the video link was originally emailed to me (which is beginning to feel a bit archaic). After I watched this fun piece of claymation, I noticed that I could Tweet the YouTube link right from the site. So of course I just had too. Afterall, you need some fun stuff mixed into the pile of serious.