The Media Future Now is an informal and dedicated group that aims to generate conversations for Washington DC area professionals, focused on finding ways to keep media-centric businesses agile, innovative and future-focused. Looking at the meet up focused on mobile media, Andrew Mirsky asks two questions related to the emergence and usefulness of mobile media applications and social networks:

• What is the true community utility of mobile technology?

• If mobile technology increasingly enables non-traditional communications behavior and non-traditional media consumption, are we in the middle of or looking at the end-product of where is this going?

I think I can try to add to the debate around the topics looking at some of my personal use, and then at some of the ramifications that disaster prevention and response are offering.

Social networks are tools, resources if you will, and it is often misunderstood that while interoperability, customization, and permeability are important they will only be as helpful as what users want them to be in the end. Also, while one can be embedded within the resources of a large, and generic platform, such as the current capacity of Twitter, BrightKite or several of the services offered by Google, just to mention a few. It is the creation of accessible and inviting networks dedicated to specific topics and interests that demonstrate the importance of the whole impact of digital social interaction and how the use of mobile media is making these exchanges more widespread, increasing the ability to expand participation beyond geographical, and technical boundaries. I've mentioned elsewhere how certain issues of mobile penetration are essential to understand critical aspects of this potential and associated missuses it may carry. Keeping in mind those reservations there are plenty of good examples to highlight the use, advantages, and where we might go with some of this.

Looking at some of my personal networks I believe that Twitter faces issues of saturation, language interoperability, and and a much needed competition from customizable networks. And yet, the capacity offered in its current incarnation has been enormous. At different levels, I have been able to engage friends, acquaintances, and close family that was unfamiliar or had little access to internet tools, and the 2.0 thinking, thanks to the integration with mobile usage. This was critical to share the recent birth of my son, the days leading up to it, the delivery, and the key events in the first months of the kid. This personal network is spreaded around a few countries, with direct family residing in several spots in Spain while the baby was born in metropolitan Washington DC. Encouraging this group to open accounts in Twitter and do minimal training to help understand it and use it was relatively simple.

Of course, Twitter adoption was not implemented successfully for those without mobile phones, or totally lacking internet access, and yet people like my grandparents were able to open a bottle of bubbly and celebrate a short moment after the baby joined us, although we had 6hrs and an ocean in between. My sister happened to be visiting and she was tracking our progress as she received sms updates via Twitter. I was barely able to send three or four messages in the scope of 9 hours of delivery. And yet these notes, sent to a multitude of recipients shared our good news, even to my mother who did not have the chance to register on Twitter, and yet she was able to receive a call while she was on a trip from my aunt telling her that she had a grandson and that all went great. Sure enough, my mother had to celebrate with a round of drinks for the friends she was traveling with, without much thinking of how essential social networks, and mobile technology had been for a celebration happening in synchronization.

These networks are transposed, replicated, and expanded for many purposes, that go well beyond those who might care about somebody having a baby. I admire tremendously the work that Brian Humphrey of the Los Angeles Fire Department has been spearheading. Using broadly available web 2.0 tools, understanding their possibilities, and how to apply them to the communications, prevention, and response of the department has become quite the example to monitor. In particular his use of Twitter in the SoCal fires of 2007 has become quite the reference:

"Because Humphrey twitters, it became apparent to him on the day of the fire that people were twittering about it. When he typed in and asked them to pick up their phones and call him, several did. "I said, 'Tell me what you're seeing. I don't have anyone on that side of the fire,'" he says. Those extra eyes helped the department tailor its fire-fighting strategy. The collective information from so many observers on the scene, sometimes dubbed "the wisdom of the crowd," allowed the department to serve the community better."

This is a small but very meaningful example. The notification, and information exchange capacity of the system are there to be used. Kokua Traffic is a user powered traffic incident report for Honolulu, Hawaii, which also hooks up into twitter. Or for instance, the American Red Cross is offering a Twitter channel to promote preparedness and inform of their highlighted activities. Part of my activities also include some form of disaster monitoring, so I often follow with interest those services that inform of developing earthquakes with their associated magnitude and possible severity. Social networks and how they are intertwined with mobile technology have strengthen the response to disasters and have assited with related crowdsourcing like we saw with the call to collaborate in doing a local translation of the disaster response system Sahana after Cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar.

There is plenty more out there, lessons to be learned, and initiatives to be explored. There is no actual end product. We are looking at a process. Enabling that process is what is making this area so exciting and meaningful. Supporting and embracing this process is were we should be putting a good amount of effort to the point that I believe we should advocate for its role as a public service. The challenges to the usefulness of this approach are primarily in the dependency that these resources may create. While advocating for open standards and avoiding an exclusive privatization of them, we should also question seriously what other systems should be added to create an essential redundancy in systems to avoid a crisis if one of them fails.