Some days are just weird. Today was one of those. I was a little tired today, and when I get tired, I get apathetic and a little down. I really should make sure I get enough sleep at night (hence the wine in my hand and the pillow awaiting me right now).
What could possibly bring a guy up from a sleep deprived downer? Your mom?
Well, yea. Apparently. My mother has lost her sister years ago. Literally lost. She disappeared. Because of that, she and her mother (my grandmother) have dedicated years of their lives to finding her.
This evening my mom and I played email-tag a few times. Right before she went to bed, she sent me the website for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Having lived in southern California for a few years now, I’ve seen the digital billboards on the highway pleading for people to keep an eye out for missing children. It’s sad that they are missing, but I love seeing the infrastructure being used for such things other than traffic delays.
Now, this organization has emergency cell phone alerts and things like that, which is awesome. But why not kick these guys into the cutting edge? I could do it. You could do it. Let’s do it.
I created a twitter account called MissingChildren and subscribed via email to their alert system. I’ve made a pretty diagram below to explain how it works.
Of course, I created this diagram before I got any actual emails, so the script actually does more than it looks like. I had to do a bunch of (careful, geek speak ahead) DOM parsing of a couple different pages to get what I needed out of it along with a few other hacks here and there.
Regardless of the script complexity, the idea is simple. Check your email every now and then and post to twitter the results. My script checks every minute of every day for new emails. Each minute counts in this case, and I’m hitting my own email address, so I can take it (as opposed to hitting an RSS feed every minute, in which case I think the RSS feed owner would be slightly ticked off).
The obvious next step is to separate out the geographical areas regarding where the emails are coming from, create separate twitter accounts for each, and let people subscribe to their area.
Any suggestions on how to improve this process or the idea in general? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
If anyone’s interested in the code, just leave a comment with your email address and we’ll talk out of band.
Thanks, and please subscribe to the Missing Children twitter account today. It doesn’t hurt at all, and can do nothing but help.
Posted by nate on Feb 22, 2008 at 11:28am
Update: Thanks to @internationale’s suggestion, I contacted the folks at MissingKids.co.uk to see if they’ll setup an email system similar to MissingKids.com so we could do the same thing for them. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Posted by Marina Martin on Feb 22, 2008 at 03:07pm
Thanks for doing this, Nate! I wrote a blog post on Oh, Twitter about @missingchildren yesterday.
Posted by nate on Feb 22, 2008 at 03:12pm
Great! Thanks for the mention Marina. I appreciate it.
Posted by Allyson on Feb 22, 2008 at 05:46pm
This is awesome Nate. Great use of Twitter!
Posted by Beth Kanter on Feb 23, 2008 at 04:27pm
Awesome Nate. This is funny .. I was on a webinar the other day – an intro social media for nonprofits. And someone who works on the issue of missing children said he was having a problem figuring out how/why social media would be useful to this cause. what a great example!
Posted by Nick Whitmoyer on Feb 24, 2008 at 09:05am
Nice job adding even more value to the Twitter community! After last year’s tragedy at VA Tech, Doug March asked the question: “Could Twitter have helped?” The answer to this is inevitable. Great work and good luck!
Posted by Bob Uva on Feb 24, 2008 at 02:36pm
This is great Nate! A creative use of social media (twitter) to help get the word out about missing children. I’ve been using twitter for a little while now and your work has given me motivation to do something to tie it back to humanitarian help. If you could share your code with me, I’d very much appreciate it.
Posted by Michael Gibbons on Feb 24, 2008 at 03:03pm
Nate, it was a great post and Beth Kanter picking it up was nice — it inspired me to write about my Buttons of hope photo buttons as personal billboards (search tools) to help find missing children. I hope you will check that out and if you like the idea help me spread it!
Posted by nate on Feb 26, 2008 at 03:11pm
Everyone, thank you so much for your kind words.
Beth, thank you for the mention in your blog. I love your outlook and writings. Thanks for doing what you do (really well).
Nick, Doug’s post definitely hits on a subject that I’ve talked on before with folks like MobileActive. And yes, it could have helped. Actually, even better than twitter is what Verizon is doing with one of the Montana universities. They’re offering an emergency SMS service to any student who registers their phone number with the university. The downside is that it’s only on the Verizon network, but that’s better than Twitter right now. If they used Twitter, it wouldn’t be restricted to Verizon, but right now Twitter is not used en masse, so either way would be fine, and either method would be better than what’s being used now (nothing).
Bob, I’ll be very happy to share my code. Perhaps I’ll just post it up in another blog post soon, or on this website. I’ll have to remove the passwords and such, but yea, that’s no problem. Thanks for asking.
Michael, I love your buttons of hope and your idea of tapping the other social networks with things like this. I think you just gave me another idea for a new script… I’ll have to think about it a little more, but yea, great work.
Posted by Brian Dusablon on Mar 03, 2008 at 09:13pm
Great idea. Well done.
Posted by Webconomist on Apr 03, 2008 at 07:38am
Great concept for use of Twitter, I’ve included that in my Blog. I think Twitter is a new tool that shows how we are finding ways to manage our attention and add relevance to what we do with all this information coming at us. It is the 90-Second Economy, or the Attention Economy. It’s not the information, it’s the attention we give it.
Posted by bj on May 01, 2009 at 09:35pm
Do undercover officers goe underground worldwide to infiltrate the pedeophile rings to find these poor missing children? I think this is the only way.
Posted by Fieke on May 19, 2009 at 04:00am
Hi Nate, I’m following @missingchildren now too although I think it’s of little use since I am located in Europe (The Netherlands). But you never know.
My normal Twitter account is @FiekeBazelmans, but I set up a second account named @findingjoey because my halfbrother Joey disappeared in 1985, when he was 5 years old. We really want to find him because his father (whom he hasn’t seen anymore since!) is quite ill and may not have long to live, and besides that, I have never seen Joey because I was adopted and only got to know my biological father after Joey had already disappeared.
I would like to know if you can help me find the best way of using Twitter to find Joey. Right now I’m not sure that I approaching this the best way possible. Maybe there are tools I should use or people I should follow?
More info about Joey: http://twurl.nl/ll4isq
Thanks in advance for your help! Kind regards,
Fieke
Posted by nate on May 19, 2009 at 09:48pm
Hi Fieke, just FYI, I’m going to respond to you directly via email in a few minutes. I just wanted to make sure I mentioned that here too though.
BJ, I’m not sure if undercover officers go underground this way, but I’m pretty sure they do. I remember seeing some TV shows that talk about doing things like that….
Cheers,
Posted by michael on Oct 27, 2009 at 11:51am
Nate, I had the same idea (leveraging the power of new media to help locate missing children). Let’s talk offline, but I’d like to know if there’s any recent progress with this project and maybe an opportunity to collaborate. Cheers, Mike
Posted by Free Online Resources For Finding Missing Persons Using Social Media | Subliminal Pixels Lab on Jan 25, 2010 at 10:58pm
[...] http://blog.perfectspace.com/2008/02/22/twitter-could-save-lives-of-children/ [...]