United States: Social media sites help aid agencies, families after disasters

Recognizing the ways social media can encourage self-sufficient disaster preparation, in November the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response launched the Facebook Lifeline Application Challenge to encourage designers to create a social media app dedicated to communicating during times of chaos, writes Deborah M. Todd on Wptv.com.

"Geo-enabled tweets and other types of social media that go on maps can be used as a way of analyzing events as they happen," said Gabriel Schmidbauer, adjunct professor of geology and geographic information systems at Aurora, American Sentinel University.