Aug 5th, 2008
Twitter Amber Alerts
The Amber Alert system covers a lot of ground when it comes to letting the public know a child is missing, but what about avenues it doesn’t cover? Nate Ritter, a web designer and programmer, decided to add another link to the chain and with a little bit of skill was able to implement a missing children feed through popular social networking site Twitter. Nate explains how it all got started:
What was your motivation for starting this project?
Nate Ritter: Living in California my wife and I are used to seeing traffic warnings and alerts about missing or endangered children displayed above the highways.
After the California wildfires in October 2007 and seeing how Twitter could easily get information to people’s cell phones, I thought it would be great to have these kind of messages sent to the public. It would help notify those people who aren’t on the highways, and could probably be faster too.
I was also motivated because my mom’s sister went missing quite a few years ago and hasn’t been seen since. The technology at that time wasn’t anything like it is now, but there’s still some missing pieces even today. I just wanted to connect those pieces because I saw the opportunity to help people.
To read the rest of Nate’s interview, check out this site.