Something new and of interest from Twitter this week as the company has now rolled out the Twitter Alert notification service. Twitter Alerts are an opt-in service where users can elect to receive “breaking” news and announcements from emergency notification services and accounts like FEMA, the USGS and other government agencies – I’m looking forward to local police force and city government accounts in my region providing these!
This from the official Twitter blog… Notifications are delivered via SMS, and if you use Twitter for iPhone or Twitter for Android, you’ll also receive a push notification*. Alerts also appear differently on your home timeline from regular Tweets; they will be indicated with an orange bell.
For a sample of what to expect, see the FEMA Alert service page where you can register to receive emergency notifications via Twitter – see https://twitter.com/fema/alerts