The terrorist attacks in Mumbai / Bombay last week have resulted in many mentions of Twitter in the old media, because the people on Twitter covered the attacks as no media outlet could. Dozens of people in Bombay and worldwide were watching television, listening to radio and looking out their windows and reporting what was going on. All of the news about the attacks was aggregated in one place.

We saw a similar phenomenon with the most recent Los Angeles wildfire outbreak. People reported what they say on Twitter far faster than the old media could report.

What makes Twitter a successful news reporting tool, or security tool? What would interfere with that process?

Because of the costs to Twitter, most of the world cannot access Twitter via SMS from their cellphones. They must have Internet access. If you’re at your desk, that also means electrical power for your computer. So, success is first predicated on having electrical power and unfettered access to the Internet.

The Mumbai attacks demonstrated how many people use Twitter for news. They also showed how the medium can be abused by spammers, rumor mongers and others who are not involved with the meme. With up to 100 Tweets a second on a topic, good information can be lost in the volume of messages and false or useless information can proliferate rapidly.

How many times was the completely false claim made that the Indian government wanted to shut down Tweets about #mumbai due to security issues? Hundreds, at least.

Sitll, the hashtag #mumbai, just like the tag #lafires, served to aggregate the related Tweets quite well and the Twitter Search services kept the stream current.

Hurricane Ike showed both the promise and the problem with Twitter. #ike brought us lots of information from people on site experiencing the hurricane. Then, they lost power or Internet connection, or, in one or two cases may have been injured or killed. The reporting was partial due to the limits imposed by electrical service and Internet access.

Were I a government agency, I would be looking for good Twitter management tools. The API is available from Twitter so I could contract for a tool to be designed and programmed. That would take a number of years and cost far more than budgeted. Or, i could find a couple of existing tools and see if they could be used in concert.

The search tool is the most obvious. It will generate an RSS feed so there are two options for the user. What a governmental agency should be able to do is monitor a Twitter search, hashtag or other, and then extract the Tweets that convey desired information. You might need several people monitoring, or you might be able to create a search that weeds out the garbage. It depends on what you are looking for.

Another thing that could be done is the creation of your own Twitter network. Since Twitter allows users to restrict Tweets to only select people, an agency could create a number of Twitter accounts and interlace all of them using the restriction parameter. Facebook and Flickr can do the same thing, so with a little work and planning a network could be created for both messages and photos that would be invisible to the general public. It wouldn’t be secret but it would be invisible to nearly everyone.

That would give an agency a robust network for important messages, pictures, etc. that have to be seen by a number of people in realtime or near realtime. Imagine firefighters shooting pics to Flickr and those pics would be available to command almost instantly. A soldier Tweets his position and the location of an enemy force without speaking or using the radio.

If nothing else, monitoring Tweets about an emergency may provide additional data. “I can see fire on xxx street” tells firefighters something. “I hear shooting by the library” does the same for police. There will be issues, false reports, etc., but they are all issues that already happen with our emergency services.

If nothing else, government agencies should consider the value of having hundreds if not thousands of people reporting to them during an emergency. Twitter will describe the state of mind of the people the emergency is affecting. It might even be a good idea for a governmental agency to fund Twitter enough to enable the SMS messaging system worldwide.