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Japan prefectures drift away from posting disaster warnings on X

japantimes.co.jp

11–20 of 55 posts

Re: Japan prefectures drift away from posting disaster warnings on X

#12
post #5

Um, good? Facebook and Twitter should never have been allowed to become the default for this, anyway . These services should have an always up web page. With an RSS feed. So anybody can connect to it and shove the warnings out however they want.

Aren't RSS feeds a pull mechanism for end users? With social media, it ends up acting like a push to the user so that they get notifications in "near-realtime", which would be important for events like flash floods.

Re: Japan prefectures drift away from posting disaster warnings on X

#13
Twitter got popular because people want to post small updates without managing a full blown website server and still be somewhat professional looking. Facebook was too informal at the time, and that's partly why WordPress was very very popular at the time.

Re: Japan prefectures drift away from posting disaster warnings on X

#14
post #5

Um, good? Facebook and Twitter should never have been allowed to become the default for this, anyway . These services should have an always up web page. With an RSS feed. So anybody can connect to it and shove the warnings out however they want.

It's difficult for most transit agencies to maintain the sort of uptime that a social media company does.

But there should be no login wall on posts from government agencies (grey check).

Re: Japan prefectures drift away from posting disaster warnings on X

#15
Personally I found the shuffles with the API a huge pain. I have a small bot and I previously just used a command line client to post my automated tweets.

With the API changes and new keys those clients all stopped working and the maintainers were uninterested in fixing them.

So now I have to implement oauth myself. Which as a busy person and poor programmer is a significant amount of work.

I went with paying IFTT a few dollars per month for now (because their API just lets me use a bearer key) but I suspect people/organisations that don't prioritize twitter won't bother.

Edit: I just checked an it looks like there might be some wrappers around the twitter interface now (twurl and twitter-api-client look promising) so perhaps time to revist.

Re: Japan prefectures drift away from posting disaster warnings on X

#17
post #5

Um, good? Facebook and Twitter should never have been allowed to become the default for this, anyway . These services should have an always up web page. With an RSS feed. So anybody can connect to it and shove the warnings out however they want.

Aren't RSS feeds a pull mechanism for end users? With social media, it ends up acting like a push to the user so that they get notifications in "near-realtime", which would be important for events like flash floods.

There are a number of services that will do push notifications for RSS feed changes. Agencies could use one of them.

Re: Japan prefectures drift away from posting disaster warnings on X

#18
post #16

I'm surprised a country still thoroughly obsessed with fax machines is posting anything on X.

Japan is Twitters second biggest market.

For consumers maybe? But for official government dissemination of information? This is the topic of discussion.

Try doing anything remotely "official" in Japan without fax or a paper process with half a dozen ink stamps. It can't be done.

Re: Japan prefectures drift away from posting disaster warnings on X

#19
post #15

Personally I found the shuffles with the API a huge pain. I have a small bot and I previously just used a command line client to post my automated tweets. With the API changes and new keys those clients all stopped working and the maintainers were uninterested in fixing them. So now I have to implement oauth myself. Which as a busy person and poor programmer is a significant amount of work. I went with paying IFTT a…

> Personally I found the shuffles with the API a huge pain.

Why is it when Apple does this nearly every year right on schedule, they're lauded as stewards of progress?

Re: Japan prefectures drift away from posting disaster warnings on X

#20
post #5

Um, good? Facebook and Twitter should never have been allowed to become the default for this, anyway . These services should have an always up web page. With an RSS feed. So anybody can connect to it and shove the warnings out however they want.

C'mon. I'm totally into tech etc and even I don't use any RSS based tools. Warning systems need to hook into the platforms people are already using. People aren't going to go out of their way to sign up to an alert that will probably never happen.
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