Earthquake Alert by SMS

March 12, 2007 5:15 PM

You may have heard of Twitter, a social networking utility to let your friends know online or by SMS what you're doing right now. Well, now even fault lines can do it, thanks to some enterprising developers. Friend one of these guys to get San Francisco quake info by text message from the USGS.
posted by SuperNova (23 comments total)

Hat tip to my friend Chris for this. Maybe one day he'll get a MeFi account...
posted by SuperNova at 5:17 PM on March 12, 2007

*beep*

Update from DU's life: He's reading about your life on his pager.
posted by DU at 5:19 PM on March 12, 2007

boo_radley is: reading about DU parsing a text page about fault lines.
posted by boo_radley at 5:21 PM on March 12, 2007

DU is: chortling...now picking his nose....now furtively stopping
posted by DU at 5:22 PM on March 12, 2007

Holy shit, are you sitting down? Are you ready, I mean really ready to make a metric-asston of money? Yessss. Listen: Of course you are. Ready? Goddamn right you are. Here it is, plebe, tremble before me: "HandWashr.com"
A social network where people who suffer from aninformiphobia can find out how compulsively other people are about hand-washing, just like they are.

Thanks to Grails on Groobvy, it's already done. Here's the first alert.
*beep* Oh, our first alert! Let's see:

• boo_radley is: washing his hands with Doc Bronner's All-in-One

*beep* another?

• boo_radley is: applying lotion to his hands with Jergens' aloe-vera 3-in-1

*beep*

• boo_radley is: realizing his hands are coated in filthy lotion now

*beep*

• boo_radley is: washing his hands with Doc Bronner's All-in-One

I'm going to be a goddamn trillionaire.
posted by boo_radley at 5:28 PM on March 12, 2007 [1 favorite]

HandWashr feature request: I'd like to block sending alerts when I *skip* washing my hands after visiting the bathroom.
posted by DU at 5:30 PM on March 12, 2007

Not to interrupt the hand washing, but one may also go directly here to sign up. You can set your preferences for magnitude, time zone, region, etc. No social networking necessary!
posted by gingerbeer at 5:44 PM on March 12, 2007

There seems to be missing functionality in all these sites. Where can I sign up for alerts a half hour BEFORE the quake hits?
posted by twsf at 5:49 PM on March 12, 2007

I was going to ask for a feature warning me I was about to shake hands with someone who had recently rubbed one out without washing their hands (HandWashr 2.0?) but now can't find the statistical email which claimed in a year you shake hands with x men and y women who have done just that.

I assume the email was made up, but what was surprising in the copy I received was the numbers were something like "7 men and 12 women."
posted by maxwelton at 5:50 PM on March 12, 2007

You can do that right here at MetaFilter for the next few weeks, twsf, with Daylight Saving Time wonking the database time stamps. You're living in the future now!
posted by cgc373 at 5:51 PM on March 12, 2007

Just like dodgeball, now with more Narcware!
posted by ioerror at 5:56 PM on March 12, 2007

Assuming you're in an earthquake you can actually feel, these alerts wouldn't be all that useful save for knowing the location and magnitude.

Of course, if you're in Lafayette, CA getting alerts all day that you're having earthquakes, you might want to brace yourself.
posted by inconsequentialist at 6:05 PM on March 12, 2007

Tsunami!
posted by rdc at 6:17 PM on March 12, 2007

I don't get the point of that Twitter thing, but I'm a joiner, so I joined.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 7:33 PM on March 12, 2007 [1 favorite]

Twitter: I'm in my bathroom, killin' my doodz.
posted by basicchannel at 8:43 PM on March 12, 2007

I'm on twitter but I have no friends, so its kind of like i'm talking to myself. CRZY.
posted by chunking express at 8:48 PM on March 12, 2007

You can't top Poopr.
posted by wendell at 8:52 PM on March 12, 2007

miss lynnster is: busy advancing her promising career as a cute & witty person of leisure.
posted by miss lynnster at 10:30 PM on March 12, 2007

Metafilter's own evhead.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 12:20 AM on March 13, 2007

What is the point of Twitter?

Anyone?
posted by mr. strange at 2:08 AM on March 13, 2007

earthquake is: in ur faultline, shakin ur d00dz

(I'll stop now.)
posted by LordSludge at 6:21 AM on March 13, 2007

I'm on Twitter (same name as here). I have no friends. Still, it's pretty cool. I use the RSS feeds to populate a "real-time" component to my blog as I send SMS messages to Twitter (my family say I don't write enough, so this solves that).

There's a Jabber Twitterbot, so when I'm signed in to GoogleTalk I get little updates. Just listening in to the traffic from folks at SXSW the past few days has been neat, for example.

Anyway, I like Twitter.
posted by ewagoner at 9:23 AM on March 13, 2007

How is twitter different than livejournal?
posted by boo_radley at 12:31 PM on March 14, 2007