Twitter as a First-Responder in Disasters?

Robert Scoble pointed to an interesting blog that Andy Carvin posted about the potential for Twitter to save lives.  For those of you who aren't familiar with Twitter yet, it's a social networking tool that's sort of like the office water cooler and RSS headlines all rolled into one.  My buddy Kitto gave me a nudge on it about a month ago, and while I was scratching my head at the time (good lord, not another social networking nightmare) I've actually come to appreciate the less tangible advantages of recreating the backyard fence in the digital hood.

In his post, Andy is suggesting that Twitter just might be the thing to save lives, where cellphones and other messaging systems fail.  He points to Hurricane Katrina as an example, with cellular networks and similar systems downed.  Text messaging appeared to work inspite of the outages because it's a relatively low-bandwidth communication tool.

Rather than repeating the wisdom of his post, I'll just offer a link to it.  It's worth the grok ...

http://www.andycarvin.com/archives/2007/03/can_twitter_save_lives.html

He's a colleague of mine at omidyar.net, and always has some profound musings on the digital divide.