I didn't go to South by Southwest (SXSW), the annual interactive festival in Austin, Texas, but I lot of my friends and colleagues did. However, I know what time many of them landed, where they were flying from, where they've been staying and eating, and even what sessions they've been attending. How do I know all this? They've been Twittering it, of course.

For those of you that aren't on top of every new technology on the scene, Twitter is an online service that combines instant messaging, SMS, social networking, and blogging (some are calling it "microblogging"), all of which, in Twitter's world, pray at the altar of Status. Your friends on the Twitter network are privy to your status, and you to theirs, and as you make more and more friends -- social networking style -- you're suddenly bombarded with status messages from a lot of people, making Twitter a blessing and a curse. On the way to meet a friend downtown? Send Twitter a text message saying "waiting for Jane at the restaurant" and all of your friends will know your status. Slogging through a pile of work? Send an IM to Twitter saying, "slaying the email dragon" and, again, all of your friends will know your status. Now imagine that you have 10 or 20 or 50 friends and they're all doing the same thing...

When I first found out about Twitter I couldn't understand the point of it all; isn't that the point of your IM status message, I asked? Why would you want to know what everyone is doing all of the time? But more and more people are imagining all kinds of uses, both frivolous and worldchanging, for the addictive app.

Andy Carvin wonders if Twitter's unique ability to tie together IM, SMS, and blogging could make it the killer app for organizing, networking, and disaster relief. It doesn't matter if my Twitter friends are at their computer or on the street with a cell phone -- they'll get my Twitter updates and I'll get theirs, making Twitter a potentially powerful way to quickly get messages out to your network. And Carvin comes up with a hypothetic situation in which Twitter would be a useful asset in the case of a disaster:

Take this hypothetical situation. Well before any disaster, groups of first-responders would set up accounts on Twitter, then mark each other as friends. After that, they might remain dormant until a disaster happens, but then they'd fire up their mobile phones and start texting each other through Twitter's shortcode. Almost instantaneously, messages would get routed to everyone in the group, allowing them to keep in touch with each other even when other networks crash.

Since so many Twitter users live in the San Francisco area, it was a natural way to communicate after a low-grade earthquake hit earlier this month. In fact, someone even set up an account for the Earthquake Hazards Program of Northern California that notifies users of impending quakes (the post from March 1: "Whoa, a magnitude 2.8 quake was felt 2 hours, 51 minutes ago!").

While Twitter has so far been the darling of the technorati (Pierre Omidyar's recent post was the news that "Non-tech friends joining Twitter, cool!"), Ross Mayfield says it's hitting its tipping point (or, to use his phrase, it's "tipping the tuna.") and is starting to break open to the wider public. But whether it's Twitter or another system, the need for a multi-platform messaging service is clearly there. As one commenter on Carvin's post noted, "If what you are asking is whether or not a multicast communication system can help rescue workers in an emergency, then the answer seems like a rather obvious YES. But if what you're asking is whether Twitter, latest flavor of the week, will actually save human beings' lives - then I'd have to suggest that you're drinking a little bit too much Kool Aid."

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