#help

Today I read an article about a girl tweeting that her boyfriend had been kidnapped. If I was in this situation, my first reaction would not be to pick up my phone and tweet. I would probably first call the police, however, in this case tweeting turned out better for this girl. Immediately after her boyfriend's car had been hijacked and he was taken away in it, this girl tweeted asking her followers for help locating the car and her kidnapped boyfriend. She tweeted a description and the license plate number of the car. After only two hours, the hijacker man was caught and this lady's boyfriend was returned. It is amazing that this happened becuase of twitter.

The girl who sent this tweet only had 71 followers on twitter. This is not a lot of people for twitter, considering how many people don't frequently check their twitter feed. So the chances that this tweet would reach enough people to be successful are slim. However, twitter has a retweet feature which allows any of your followers to retweet your tweet and send it to all of their followers. This creates a chain reaction and a tweet that only reaches a couple of people originally can spread and end up reaching a large number of people in a very short period of time.

In this case, the tweet reached many people, and the right people because the sender requested everyone to retweet it. This girl was able to get her message out to people that she would have no way of contacting by herself. Eventually the tweet reached someone who worked for a private security team and this person was able to catch the hijacker. If this girl had just gone to the police there is no way that they could have sent this information to this many people as fast as it was spread. This is a great technique for catching criminals.

This incident relates to what we have talked about in class many time. It is representative of information flow through a network. The person who was able to help this woman, was not in this woman's network. However, the information was able to spread across networks and reach a large number of people in a short period time with help from a popular social networking website.