Comments on: Earthquake Alert by SMS

Earthquake Alert by SMS

SuperNova — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 17:15:43 -0800

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.

By: SuperNova

SuperNova — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 17:17:26 -0800

Hat tip to my friend Chris for this. Maybe one day he'll get a MeFi account...

By: DU

DU — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 17:19:13 -0800

*beep* Update from DU's life: He's reading about your life on his pager.

By: boo_radley

boo_radley — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 17:21:05 -0800

boo_radley is: reading about DU parsing a text page about fault lines.

By: DU

DU — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 17:22:58 -0800

DU is: chortling...now picking his nose....now furtively stopping

By: fandango_matt

fandango_matt — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 17:26:07 -0800

Thank goodness there's a finally a way to know if an earthquake is happening near me!

By: boo_radley

boo_radley — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 17:28:14 -0800

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.

By: DU

DU — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 17:30:14 -0800

HandWashr feature request: I'd like to block sending alerts when I *skip* washing my hands after visiting the bathroom.

By: gingerbeer

gingerbeer — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 17:44:01 -0800

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!

By: twsf

twsf — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 17:49:03 -0800

There seems to be missing functionality in all these sites. Where can I sign up for alerts a half hour BEFORE the quake hits?

By: maxwelton

maxwelton — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 17:50:59 -0800

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."

By: cgc373

cgc373 — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 17:51:54 -0800

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!

By: ioerror

ioerror — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 17:56:09 -0800

Just like dodgeball, now with more Narcware!

By: inconsequentialist

inconsequentialist — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 18:05:06 -0800

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.

By: rdc

rdc — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 18:17:04 -0800

Tsunami!

By: ThePinkSuperhero

ThePinkSuperhero — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 19:33:29 -0800

I don't get the point of that Twitter thing, but I'm a joiner, so I joined.

By: basicchannel

basicchannel — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 20:43:08 -0800

Twitter: I'm in my bathroom, killin' my doodz.

By: chunking express

chunking express — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 20:48:37 -0800

I'm on twitter but I have no friends, so its kind of like i'm talking to myself. CRZY.

By: wendell

wendell — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 20:52:40 -0800

You can't top Poopr.

By: miss lynnster

miss lynnster — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 22:30:10 -0800

miss lynnster is: busy advancing her promising career as a cute & witty person of leisure.

By: stavrosthewonderchicken

stavrosthewonderchicken — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 00:20:55 -0800

Metafilter's own evhead.

By: mr. strange

mr. strange — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 02:08:03 -0800

What is the point of Twitter? Anyone?

By: LordSludge

LordSludge — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 06:21:12 -0800

earthquake is: in ur faultline, shakin ur d00dz (I'll stop now.)

By: ewagoner

ewagoner — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 09:23:16 -0800

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.

By: boo_radley

boo_radley — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 12:31:54 -0800

How is twitter different than livejournal?