How Twitter Can Save Your Life in a Zombie Apocalypse #ZA

Thursday (10/08/09) was an unusually quiet day on the Twitter front, for almost 3 hours I didn’t get a single update from anyone I follow, and I normally get updates from the people I follow once every couple of minutes, so going 3 hours with no posts I naturally began to worry, and I began to wonder…

Had a zombie apocalypse already devoured all the people I follow on Twitter?

So I start to load my gun, and grab my sword when Twitter user @rhysatwork sends me a note telling me
(via Twitter search) that Twitter was actually frozen, and wasn’t sending out any updates (Twitter frozen).  Ok, good news, the immediate threat of a Zombie attack seemed to be over, but what lessons can be learned from this very frightening experience?

In the event of a zombie apocalypse Twitter can save your life.

You will get the news sooner on Twitter

Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein point out in The Twitter Book that:

Twitter has also turned out to be one of the world’s best seismograph

They point to the graph below to show you how quickly the Los Angeles earthquake was mentioned on Twitter compared to traditional media outlets.

So if you were paying attention to Twitter during the earthquake in July of 2008 you would have heard about it 4 minutes before any traditional main stream media would have mentioned it.

4 minutes could be the difference between life and death as you see that fleshy looking stranger run at you with out stretched arms mumbling or shouting incoherently about “BRAINNNNSSSSS!” as you debate whether you should pull the trigger.

Twitter will give you better local information

If you followed the Iran Election Crisis in July you found out first hand how beneficial Twitter can be in a real crisis to get information from a region where traditional media is either not allowed to go, or too afraid to go.  In fact, Twitter was so valuable during the Iran Election Crisis that the US State Department asked Twitter to delay scheduled downtime so that the coverage could continue.

Imagine how beneficial Twitter could be during a zombie uprising…traditional media wouldn’t dare go near zombie hot zones, much like traditional media was not allowed to cover the Iran crisis in Iran, but people forced into those situations will be able to share their experiences via Twitter, and give advice about locations safe from zombie activity (it is well known fact that zombies lack the mental capacity to grasp or understand how to use Twitter so it would be safe to Tweet about such locations).

One could argue that Twitter’s instability would make it useless in such a horrific event, but I am not so sure that is true.  Although Twitter has had stability issues but those have been mainly the result of malicious hackers or ill-conceived upgrades they have made to their platform, and in an actual zombie uprising hackers and Twitter engineers would be spending their time preparing their defenses, not making upgrades or attacking Twitter.  It would likely be weeks days or even weeks before Twitter went down, and would be more likely to be caused power outages or the internet going down.

How to use Twitter to save you from the Zombie Apocalypse

Embrace the #ZA Hashtag

Hashtags (#) in Twitter are a way for users to categorize their Tweets.  For example, if someone Tweet’s something with the #Articulate tag they are likely Tweeting something directly related to the company Articulate.  This allows people to easily find that information via the Twitter Search.  For example, check out the following search for the #Articulate tag:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23Articulate

And look at the Search Results that it returns:

All the topics that are returned are directly related to the Articulate Studio learning tools, and you will notice that absent from the search is any posts related directly to the adjective form of the word, which is good.

The #ZA hashtag

So what hashtag should we be looking for in the event of a Zombie Apocalypse?  I would like to suggest that we start to make #ZA the official hashtag of the Zombie Apocalypse.  It is nice because it is short, as it only use 3 characters which will enable Tweeple to use more of the 140 character Twitter limit to post important details about the attack.  Also it isn’t a widely adopted hashtag for anything else making it a perfect hashtag for following the Zombie Apocalypse.

Get a Twitter Client like TweetDeck

You can configure Twitter clients like Tweekdeck to watch specific search terms and notify you when someone tweets a specific term (like #ZA).  This will help you get notified faster in the event of an attack.

I created a short 4:50 screencast below that shows you how to configure search notifications in TweetDeck.

View this screencast on Screenr

There are other Twitter clients that can also help you quickly do Twitter searches, and even some mobile options that work well on the iPhone, like Echofon that might be worth checking out.

Twitter will save your life in a Zombie uprising

In the event of a Zombie Apocalypse Twitter can help save your life…isn’t that reason enough to start using Twitter?