photo courtesy: uselessnano

Tim Hughes (Twitter: @timothychughes) of The BOOT – The Business of Online Travel – posted a highly personal account of his experience watching the Mumbai terrorist events unfold.  His wife’s cousin and family were long-term residents at the Trident Oberoi hotel. His wife’s cousin (mom) and children were trapped in the hotel for 36 hours hiding from the terrorists.

From old media to new media – getting the information he needed

Tim started tracking the news using old media–the BBC and CNN–but found himself moving to Twitter:

By the end of the second day I had my eyes glued to Twitter under the search tag #mumbai and more generally searching Twitter for any mention on the word Oberoi. Towards the end of the siege these twitter feeds updated themselves with nearly a tweet a second. People from all around the world were tweeting with the important (“am watching pictures of commandos storming the hotel”), the emotional (“thoughts are with all those in Mumbai”), the practical (“here is the direct line to the Oberoi Mumbai staff”), the wishful (“heard a rumour that it was all over, is that true?”) and of course the useless (“here is a link to [an unrelated] video”). Meanwhile my other screen was alternating between live web streaming of NDTV (local news) and CNN-IBN (CNN’s partnership in India). Live professional feeds on one screen and live citizens on the other.

This kept me so up to date that I actually saw the live footage (as it happened) of my cousin and her family stepping out of the hotel and towards the buses. My cheers of glee brought work colleagues rushing into my office as I jabbed at the screen screaming “That’s them!!! That’s them!!!

Twitter was also my primary source of information in the early hours of the attack.  I (Twitter: @elliottng) follow about 1200 people on Twitter and started to see tweets tagged #mumbai with news of the event.  Associated Press also recounted the rapid flow of information on Twitter:

Twitter users, who simply tagged their comments “mumbai,” traded information at a rate of 50-100 posts a minute in messages that were sometimes wrong, often fragmented, but always instant.

The lightning-quick updates of the attacks that killed 174 people read like a sketchy but urgent blow-by-blow account of the siege, providing further evidence of a sea change in how people gather their information in an increasingly Internet-savvy world.

“‘Emergency’ can some one check if there bomb blast of some shootout in oberoi hotel of anywhere in Mumbai ? I am at inox inside,” a user named Puneet wrote on Twitter, a popular “microblogging” Web site, shortly after the violence began.

“I just heard what sounded like a bomb blast! I hope I am wrong,” krazyfrog, a user in Mumbai, wrote soon after.

“People stay where you are. We’re under attack,” wrote Whizzkidd, also in the city.

Unfortunately, as Shel Israel related, Twitter also exposed the hatred and evil that poisons some people’s thinking.

Twitter delivers Situational Awareness

I write this post because I noticed that Travel technology blogger Alex Bainbridge (blog, Twitter: @alexbainbridge) just joined Twitter today (and sheepishly blogged about it), and I wanted to congratulate him for joining the party–its far from being too late and just getting started.  I encouraged Alex to follow 100 travel industry people (with a focus on his existing friends in the blogosphere and Real Life) and aim for about 100 people following him back to start with.  This forms a good platform for getting situational awareness in the specific field of focus.  I also saw that Guillaume Thevenot of Hotel Blogs was complaining of Twitter overuse by Travolution (I totally disagree) and I encourage him to give it another chance, maybe by following more than 24 people!  And if someone is livetweeting a conference and you’re not interested, try the Twitter utility called TwitterSnooze that lets you unfollow and automatically refollow after time is up.

With that basic platform, the next step is to discover, over time, a more diverse group of people to follow.  This further creates even greater situational awareness of the world as your followers increase.  With Mumbai, I heard about the news quickly because I follow @arjunram, an entrepreneur based in Bangalore, who started tweeting and retweeting news about the attack almost in real-time.

I’m hopeful that the Travel blogosphere can benefit from Twitter in the situational awareness that it can deliver to each of us.  Yes it is distracting and “noisy,” and not good for people at risk of Adult Onset ADD (yikes).  But in the difficult times that the Travel industry is facing, this situational awareness could deliver the information each of us need to make the right decisions for our companies and ourselves.